Wildlife invades my home

This morning I stepped out into the small porch room that opens into my kitchen and was startled by a sparrow who seemed to be messing around on the storage shelf. The sparrow quickly darted out the hole in the wall (meant for a dryer to vent) and I continued poking through my compost bin.
After a minute or so I noticed that the birds outside were making a lot of angry squawking and chirping, and I kind of half-thought, are they that upset I scared one sparrow out of my porch? Then the sparrow flew back in the hole again, darted out when I looked up, and continued scolding me from outside. Okay, I thought, I guess I should cover this hole. So I propped up a piece of cardboard against it and finished with my worm bin. But the birds kept yelling at me. I glanced up at the shelf the sparrow had been fussing over, and it dawned on me.
See it? Look closer.
The little buggers are building a nest in my bubble wrap. I imagine that a rational person would just block the hole in the wall and throw out the nest, but anyone who knows me knows that's not what I'm going to do. There are going to be little baby birds on my porch! Awesome!

What is a little annoying is that I like to keep my kitchen door open, and rely on the outer screen door to keep the bugs out. Now that I've got birds flying in and out of the porch, I'm a little worried they might decide to explore my kitchen, and I'm not about to have frantic sparrows flapping around inside my house. So...I'll be picking up a big piece of some meshy fabric this weekend to hang over my kitchen door. To keep the birds out.

In other local wildlife news...my anole friend from the summer is back! She was sunning herself on my back stoop when I got home from school on Thursday. The end of her tail looks a little beat up, but otherwise seemingly no worse for the wear after winter.

Christmas!!! (and pickles)

Me and my friend Sarah went to lunch on Sunday. The Atherton Mills Farmers Market had Sunday hours, so we went down to Southend to find lunch and then hit up the market. We ate at the IceHouse on South Blvd., and because it was Sunday (or just because I like fatty food), I got chicken and waffles, with sweet potato and bacon hash. I'd heard of chicken and waffles as a meal, but somehow always imagined it like, chicken and dumplings, or something with gravy involved. Nope. Piece of fried chicken, big ass waffle, little cup of syrup. Why not serve two amazing foods together with a sugary condiment? Fried chicken is not something I know how to make, but I might have to learn soon. (Dear family, I will be frying sweet potatoes and bacon together when I come home.)


The whole reason I wanted to go to the farmer's market was to buy meat. I got a Netflix trial last week, and finally watched "Food Inc." which increased the number of generally icky feelings I have towards our food industry. (Admittedly, not enough to turn down fried chicken on a waffle.) So I got some ground beef and eggs and bratwurst from the Windy Hill Farm guy and had a lovely conversation about the slaughtering regulations for assorted animals. (He can kill his own poultry and rabbits, but has to send his pigs, cows and lambs to a slaughterhouse in Greensboro.)

Then Sarah and I were enticed over to Pickleville. The friendly proprietor (a Jew from Philly who used to make pizzas and now makes pickles) let us try a million kinds of pickles, and I wound up spending five bucks on a tub of the most amazing pickles ever. I got half regular dill (light years beyond Vlasic) and half "half-sour" which I guess aren't pickled as long and so are a little fresher tasting.

Maybe tonight's dinner wasn't picturesque, but damn was it good. (Two kinds of pickles..!! Bratwurst from a pig who got to root around in the forest and eat real pig food!!)


And finally...the best thing to come out of my farmer's market trip? A Christmas tree!!!!!!!

Two Successes, One Almost-Success, and One Not-Successful-Yet

Our kids bombed their midterm (we're talking like class averages in the 50s). And then they bombed the quiz we gave them on Friday that was designed to be relatively easy and give them a confidence boost after failing the midterm so miserably. However, I refuse to count this a failure because we have three more quarters to get them ready for N.C.'s End of Course exam; it just goes in the category of not-yet-successful. This morning I got up and cranked out two study guides for them to complete as homework on Monday and Tuesday in preparation for their test on Wednesday. Do you know what two people make up the city's Executive Branch? How many justices are there on the N.C. Supreme Court? What is our state legislature called? No? Well, neither do a lot of our students...yet. But they had damn well better know it on Wednesday, because we will have worked their butts off and they will have no excuse. End of story.

Success #1 today was finishing spray painting my porch furniture. Well, almost-success. I got two hand-me-down white plastic deck chairs and a matching bench from my no-longer-neighbor Genevieve before she moved. I wanted them to be something other than white, so I decided to try Krylon's Fusion paint, which is supposed to bond right to plastic without priming or sanding or any prep work at all. The stuff is magical! My two chairs look beautiful.
The bench, on the other hand, had been painted white in a previous life (white paint on top of white plastic...not sure what sense that makes). The Fusion paint does indeed fuse beautifully to plastic, without chipping or looking blotchy or puddling up or anything. However, it does not fuse beautifully to crappy old paint. I tried to scrap off as much of the old paint as I could, but it still looks like the furniture equivalent of someone with a skin disease.
Gross. I'll have to make a seat cushion, and throw some pillows on it.

My second success of the day was chili. When I lived in Chicago, I was fortunate enough to live a block away from a fantastic chili and pizza and hot dog place called Chili Mac's. If you're ever in Chicago and want an amazing chili dog instead of those funky "Chicago-style" hot dogs with neon-green relish and celery salt and nasty little "sport" peppers... take a 22 or 36 to Briar and Broadway and thank me later. I'd never heard of "Cincinnati-style" chili and honestly had no idea what made it any different from what I knew as like, normal chili. Chili powder and cumin = chili, as far as I knew. BUT! I did some googling this morning, found a couple recipes, and actually made a batch of chili that I won't get sick of and throw away after a week. It has cinnamon, coriander, allspice, paprika, cumin, chili, cayenne, and bay leaf (as well as the usual garlic, onion, etc.) I have a tendency to relegate things like cinnamon and allspice to cookie recipes, and forget they can make other things too.
Next up: polyurethaning my blue bookshelf and putting plastic insulation film over my windows.

Hey October, where the heck did you go??

Seriously though. The last two weeks have gone simultaneously very, very slowly and astonishingly fast. I am thoroughly exhausted, have been living off not-enough sleep, with no time for breakfast, and Bojangles for dinner. Consequently, I woke up yesterday with a monster of a cold. My face feels like it's being pounded by mallets. I've been throwing down EmergenC, stocked up on anti-viral Kleenex, and my skin feels crawly and gross. Not a fun way to spend my Saturday (and, so far, my Sunday). But...I'm going to Chicago on Thursday to visit for the long weekend, and I'm pretty ridiculously excited about that. A light at the end of the tunnel!!

In the meantime, I've accomplished a few things the last two weeks.

I had a bunch of friends (including my sister!) over for dinner. I made curry and we drank a lot of beer.

I repainted a shelf that my old lady neighbor friend Genevieve gave me. It was dirty black when I got it, with a dead cockroach sliding around on the bottom shelf.

And now it's a kind of robin's egg/turquoise! Matches my Kandinsky and Picasso prints.


I stocked up on flannel from the Goodwill!


This morning, I decided I should put a coat of satin poly on the bookshelf, and repaint the white plastic deck furniture Genevieve has also given me. So I threw on clothes and went outside to go to the Home Depot, only to find my anole friend camped out on my car.


I spent 10 minutes chasing him around the car until he finally jumped off. Pretty ridiculous. I'm glad nobody was around because they'd have seen me walking in circles around my parked car saying things like "Seriously? C'mon friend!" to a small lizard. He kept changing from green to brown as I chased him around the car; pretty adorable. And...since I finally have a new phone(!!!!) I could actually take pictures of him.
I finally pulled the car out of the car port and got him to run off into the bushes.

For the remainder of my Sunday, I'm collecting sources for our kids to use to research their current events project. They're each going to do a presentation on some issue they feel strongly about. Our options so far are: Prop 8/Gay Marriage; the Westboro Baptist a-holes/free speech; Islamic Community Center/Mosque in NYC; Texas and their social studies standards/are we a "Christian" nation?; CA Prop 19/legalizing weed (guaranteed to be a favorite); AZ's immigration law; offshore drilling; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools' decision to close/reshuffle a lot of low-income schools in Charlotte.

I'm also going to try out Krylon's Fusion paint, which is supposed to stick directly to plastic without any sanding or priming.

Is it wrong that I'm way more excited about the latter?

Vermiculture Composting!!! Worms!!! Hooray!!

I woke up this morning at 9:30, which you'd think was a nice normal time, except I went to bed around 3 and somehow my body STILL doesn't get the concept of sleeping in. Compared to my usual 5 though, I guess 9:30 is a big deal. Anyway, I decided if I was going to be awake for a larger part of the day than I had planned, I should do something with it. (Besides the silly UNCC assignment I have to submit before midnight. Ugh.) I've been reminiscing about Chicago lately, with the "fall" weather here in Charlotte skirting around an appropriate level of cold. One of the many, many things I loved about my life there was my giant bin of worms!!
It sat in the corner of my Chicago kitchen, and as you can see in the photo, was always kind of big and awkward. Super convenient for chucking vegetable peelings in as I was cooking, but also pretty ugly.

So, for my new worm bin, I got a smaller Tupperware:

For anyone who's interested, it's incredibly easy to convince worms to make you some compost. At the nature museum in Chicago, we did a bunch of workshops for people where they got to take home little starter bins and they were always a big hit. You just need a Tupperware bin with a lid, wet newspaper, a drill, and worms.

You can get red wigglers (also called red worms, or if you're super fancy, Eisenia foetida) at PetSmart. Most pet stores carry them as food for toads and lizards and whatnot, but they aren't always in stock. You don't want night crawlers or earthworms - they're totally different. The guy at PetSmart had three containers today, but I just grabbed two.

There's some estimate I've read that says something like you need two pounds of worms for every one pound of food scraps each day. Since I do not produce a pound of food waste every day, I did not get two pounds of worms. That's like 2000 worms. I think I had about 200 worms to start with in my Chicago bin, but they reproduce quickly when they're happy, so I had a lot more than that when I finally gave the bin away before moving.

They come packed in some peat-mossy-type bedding, which I just dumped into the bins along with the worms. Along with the worms, you put in a good layer of damp newspaper, cut into strips or shredded. Easiest way to get it right is to dunk a big wad of it in water, then wring it out like a sponge. The newspaper should be damp but not drippy.

The worms will eat the paper, and it gives them something to burrow in. Then when you start to add food scraps, you bury the scraps under the paper and the worms will go to town. You can use brown grocery bag paper too.

Make sure you've got holes drilled in the lid for ventilation, and you're good to go. With a lid on it, you shouldn't have to moisten your worms much, if at all. Keep them someplace that isn't too cold or too hot, and if the bin is see-through like mine, someplace dark. Just add food scraps under the newspaper bedding, and sooner or later your bin will start to look like a pile of compost instead of a pile of newspaper.

To harvest it, what I always did was shove all the composty-stuff to one side, put in new newspaper and food scraps on the other side, and in a couple days all the worms will move over to the new food. Then you can just scoop out the compost, sift through it to make sure you don't have any stragglers, and it's good to go for your plants! You can put most plant-based food scraps in it, but some things like onions and broccoli will start to smell bad before your worms can break them down fully. Also avoid citrus fruits - they're not a big fan of those. But anything else, raw or cooked, as long as it isn't oily, and doesn't include animal products. They can eat tea bags and coffee grounds too. My little guys have some old apple chunks and spent Earl Grey to get started on. Tasty treats.

I'm so happy to have some worms back in my life. It felt so wrong throwing carrot peelings in the trashcan when there are starving worms in China.

Go away, stuff.

I have a fear of being trapped in stuff. This might have something to do with growing up in my house, where the chair-to-family-member ratio is about 8:1 and the book-to-family-member ratio is probably in the neighborhood of 175:1. It also comes from moving into three (and out of two) apartments in three cities in the last three years. Nothing makes you realize how much crap you have that you don't need more than moving. I love getting rid of things and there's something satisfyingly freeing about throwing bags for the Goodwill in my trunk. Yesterday, I went through my bookshelf and my closet and got two big grocery bags out the door and out of my life.
Books are one thing I have a hard time parting with, but most of the ones I dumped were either freebies or were for college classes or were fluffy, silly books to begin with. I'm pretty ruthless with my clothes, although I have a bad habit of saying "Oh, but I could re-sew this into something else!" about items that have nice fabric or some other vaguely appealing feature. However, I have a lot less storage space in this apartment than in my last one, so it just doesn't make sense to keep a bunch of clothes I don't really wear and don't have a place to store.

So with two big bags of stuff gone, I felt justified buying a flannel shirt and a jumper and a few other fall things from Target. AND...finally spending a $20 Amazon gift card. Cubic-foot for cubic-foot, still a net loss. I got four books. Two novels (Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann and Little Bee by Chris Cleave) and two Christian-y books (Crazy Love by Francis Chan and A Praying Life by Paul Miller). I will be sure to let you all know if they're good.

Suzy Homemaker

Since acquiring a dining room table and four vaguely matching chairs (and since finally getting a paycheck that allows me to buy more than cereal and milk), I've been meaning to have some people over for dinner. So I did! Getting up in the morning and spending the day cooking and baking is something that, just a few years ago, I never in a million years would have imagined I'd find enjoyable. But after a week of getting up at 5, and getting home at 6, it's awfully nice to have something else to do that's engaging and creative and actually produces a tangible, practical result. Not that teaching isn't those things in its own way, but physically making something, especially something that you can then enjoy with friends, really is kind of meditative sometimes.

I made crispy fennel bread sticks first. The recipe is from Chico Hot Springs Resort in Montana, which wisely publishes a cookbook. (They also have an outdoor hot spring pool and some of the biggest freaking sky you've ever seen.) I also made carrot gnocchi, which I had to attempt twice after failing at pureeing carrot, but which were infinitely worth it. Plus ribbony zucchini with basil and lemon, plus a lemon cake with a glaze that I had to improvise because I didn't feel like buying a bottle of limoncello so I could use a tablespoon of it. Yes, I'm a Food&Wine magazine whore. But I'm totally okay with that. One of these days I'll have the sickest cooking skills ever and will be able to whip up recipes out of thin air, but until that day comes...foodandwine.com it is.

Although my plates are mismatched sized, my glasses are mismatched shapes, and we used paper towels for napkins, the table looked pretty sexy:

We stayed up till almost one talking about Israel and creationists and the problems with our public education system, and probably some other things that I should remember but don't.

And so by Sunday morning the table looked sexy in that rumpled, bleary-eyed, morning-after kind of way:


And I've still got leftover cake. Win, and win.

A spelling lesson

Over the long Labor Day weekend, Toby and I paid a visit to the Home Depot and got some curtain rods. After much effort, plaster dust, paint flaking and dulled drill bits, we got them hung. Apparently you need a masonry bit or, I don't know, a diamond-edged spike, to put holes in my walls. Regardless, the place has gotten a lot homier over this past week, so for the benefit of curious family members, here are a bunch of new photos of 518 Willoughby:

Still needed are two barrel lampshades for my 60s golden pine cone lamps (on the end table). Also, some throw pillows. Also, a GFI outlet in the kitchen that can power the microwave without tripping the whole circuit.
Toby brought his turntable! He also brought a stool from the old Korner Diner in Newark (may it rest in peace). The stool make a nice, shiny side table, and its peely gray vinyl is still a comfy seat. Next up is re-covering the chair cushions. Midnight blue? Gold? Ideas?


A dimly lit photo of the dining room...but...I have a table! And four bentwood chairs. AND I have back the cuckoo clock I got in Germany in 10th grade! Although the damn cuckoo itself is so irritating I finally took the weight off the cuckoo chain.
These curtain rods were a nightmare to hang. This one is hung with a nail on one end, and a half-in screw on the other. There's a 5-inch circle of paint that popped off the wall when I tried to drill a hole, so that's held onto the wall with a giant piece of packing tape. Plaster walls are nice and solid and good for keeping the place well-insulated, but good lord they're a pain in the ass to hang ANYTHING on.

Still some things to pick up, hang up, and tidy up, but the place is looking a lot nicer than a month ago.

Teaching goes well. I think, to be honest, I had braced myself to be miserable and stressed and hate my life at this point. TFA even gave us a whole presentation about the phases of your first year of teaching, and how by October many people reach the "disillusionment" phase, or something to that effect. Apparently last year the Charlotte corps had more corps members quit after their first year than any other region. Yikes, right? I'm happy to report, however, that I actually very much like my job so far, and the people I work with, and our students. I'm also very thankful that it's my second year teaching, and that I'm not doing this straight out of college. Plus, co-teaching with someone who's been at the school for a year already has made a big difference in terms of the amount of work I have to do alone. Being able to divide up grading, or planning, or what have you makes things a lot less overwhelming. It's also nice to be living in a region where I have friends and family within easy driving distance.

As an addendum, one of my favorite kids (although one of the most obnoxious in class) stayed after school recently to get his homework done. He had to write sentences using vocab words from an article we'd read in class. He wrote one sentence with the word "wuz," and so I told him to spell "was" correctly. He erased "w-u-z" but then paused. He couldn't tell me how to spell "was." With some prodding, he figured it out, but it took a minute or two. "Man, I be texting too much!" he said, and then grabbed a dry erase marker and showed us how he and his friends spell things. "Dnt" and "Cmeing" and "Wut"... "Wen ru cmeing ovr?" I pointed out that "Cmeing" has just as many letters as "Coming," but somehow that didn't seem to be the point. Anyhow, it had never occurred to me that kids might actually FORGET how to spell words like WAS!!! because they write everything in text language. Even on facebook I see kids spell stuff like that. Sometimes I think there must be some contest to come up with whose spelling requires the longest amount of time to decipher.

Anyway, I was at the fabric store today, and I saw this:

Really??

My neighbor Genevieve

I'm getting ready to make some grilled cheese for Toby and me for lunch when someone knocks on my back door. An old lady with a red plaid shirt, and gray hair held in dangly coils with bobby pins stood in my back porch and introduced herself as Genevieve. Genevieve lives in one of the other buildings and had noticed that I liked plants (she pointed to my screen porch, where I have a couple two-foot-high rubber trees, and a spider plant on a plant stand). She has a number of plants on her porch and was going to be getting rid of some of them soon, and would I like some? I realized I wasn't sure which unit she lived in, so I offered to walk outside with her so she could show me. We walk across the parking lot and she points out a number of pots of soil she has stashed in the grass next to her porch. "I know when you move into a new place you never have pots, you never have good soil," she explains. "Would you like some of these? Here, this is good soil in this one." So she gives me a pot with soil in it, and a variegated ivy on a plastic hanger that she didn't want anymore. Then she asks if I want a cutting from an orchid she has inside. Obviously the answer is yes, so I follow her into her apartment and through to her screen porch where she just snaps a piece of stem off of a plant and hands it to me. "You don't have to root this at all, you just moisten the soil and put it in and it will flower in...around February."

Score. So I've got a variegated ivy, a cutting from some kind of orchid that looks like a cross between a begonia and a Wandering Jew, and she promised she'd let me know when she was ready to get rid of some more plants. She is 82, apparently, and from Paris. She studied at the Sorbonne. And she's living on her own with a screen porch full of bonsai, begonias and astroturf. And just happened to notice I had some plants on my porch.

I have located my camera charger. It's in Delaware. Once I repossess it, I'll be able to take some pictures of things again. Like my new (old) bike.

Reason 37 that I love my apartment

It appears that the big shrub outside my screen porch is actually a gardenia bush.
In both Delaware and Chicago, gardenias are houseplants that you buy in small pots in the grocery store to give as Mothers' Day gifts, so it completely threw me when I noticed familiar-looking flowers on this giant bush. The landscapers recently were out pruning mindlessly with loud electric hedge-trimmers, so it's not exactly flowering profusely, but given as the bush is behind my porch and not near anybody else's apartment, I had no qualms about cutting one of the few flowers I did see.

Gardenias smell so incredible, and nobody's going to enjoy it out in the parking lot. Now my bathroom smells lovely. (See the charming bud vase? Formerly a flask from a hospital lab, courtesy of my mom.) I should probably clean the rust off the overflow drain - that looks kind of dingy.

In teaching-related news, I've been schlepping off to the Marriott every morning for the past week for more TFA training/Kool Aid drinking (I'm swimming in it these days)/planning for my class that I start teaching in THREE WEEKS! I stopped by my school yesterday to scrounge up a text book, and was able to talk to the woman there who does scheduling. She told me that for all three blocks I'm teaching, I'd be working with an '09 Corps Member who teaches Civics & Econ inclusion. (Inclusion is just the way they teach the Special Ed kids who aren't so severely disabled they need their own class. They're "included" in the normal class, and the whole class is then taught by a classroom teacher and a special ed teacher who work together.) I'm really excited about this because my co-teacher, Cliff, taught this class last year, and so has a much better sense than I do of what works and what doesn't. Plus, having a co-teacher means I won't have to struggle on my own to differentiate for kids at different levels while trying to teach the rest of the students. Plus, he's already done a lot of planning for our class, so it's just going to be a matter of getting together and getting on the same page. Plus, he's been at the school for a year so he knows who can help with what, who's in charge of what, and all that other stuff that you get to know after working at a school but can't possibly know when you're brand new.
Tonight I have a dinner scheduled with some TFA donors who live just down the road. TFA has scheduled all of us to go to a couple of these dinners as part of their development campaign. Basically, we get a free meal in return for putting a friendly face on the organization they give money to. Although I'm not the most naturally outgoing person ever, I really kind of enjoy getting to know strangers in smaller settings like this, so it should be fun. Plus there are a couple other corps members going too, so it's not just me and the donors. I was planning on walking, but it has suddenly started thunderstorming (the weather here goes from sunny to monsoon in about 20 seconds) so that might not work out. I did walk to Ben & Jerry's though (3 minutes away) and got a black raspberry frozen yogurt. I don't know what possessed me to get the 'healthy' option - real ice cream is way better. Next time it's back to something with plenty of fat in it.
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Our house is a very, very, very fine house

Today's my last day of freedom before it's back to TFA-land and the Marriott. I decided to pull out one of my p90x DVDs (for the first time in over two years) and spent an hour doing Kenpo with Tony Horton. I was pleasantly surprised to not be keeling over by the end - credit I'm going to give to LA Boxing back in Chicago. Made some ham and eggs, and a cup of tea, ate some nutella, and got to work on a painting I've been doing to go over my bed.

It's going to be half of a diptych, because I want the whole piece to be as wide as my mattress. But I figure it'll have the green, blue and brown that I currently have going on in my mismatched bedroom, and it'll give me something to put behind my bed without my having to go buy a headboard. Or a bedframe. The photo I'm working from is from an issue of my favorite magazine Orion and is part of a series of "landscapes" taken underwater in ponds and streams. It's the biggest watercolor I've ever tried, and it's taking me a lot longer than I thought it would, but it's nice, meditative work and I'm happy with how it's looking so far. It's been too long since I made anything pretty.

Otherwise, I've been listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash (thanks to a hefty donation from my Dad's iTunes), chatting with faraway friends of the Biber and Ex types, and enjoying one hell of a thunderstorm from my cozy screen porch. I have no porch furniture at the moment, but since I also have no dining room/kitchen table, I've at least got a spare chair.

Week One = Success

I think I'm going to love Charlotte. I knew I loved my apartment from day one, but I've been spending time this week getting to know this whole new city, and I think I'm liking it. To reiterate what I'm sure I've said before...it is so good to have a home again. Sarah stopped over for dinner on Friday, and even though I don't have any dining room furniture yet (arrives from Delaware in a month), we had a fantastic meal. A meal that wasn't cooked in the cafeteria at Delta State. Pasta with broccoli, and toasted garlic and breadcrumbs, with garlic bread and green salad. Plus strawberries were on sale at Harris Teeter, so that was dessert. Very classy, even if we had to use magazines as place mats on my coffee table.

An additional success this week was spending Friday night in Winston-Salem with some excellent people.

I drove up to hang out with Reed and Discepelo, only to discover Kate M. and Caroline T. were there too! Plus a bunch of other cool folks, some still in college (some younger than students I've taught!) some not. It was a fairly ridiculous evening, but a nice reminder that there's no need to start feeling old at 25 if I can still flip a solo cup and chug Bud Light. A good deal of the night looked like this:
After my brief return to college, I drove back to Charlotte the next morning, went to get lunch at a place called the Thomas Street Tavern. While there, I met a number of interesting people at the bar. I was sitting there with my Red Oak when an old man and his wife sit down one stool over. The man sets an empty pickle jar on the bar. I looked closer, and noticed the jar was not in fact empty. There were 15 or 20 spotted beetles crawling around inside it. The bartender (sexy) came over and apparently knew the guy and his wife (as well as everyone else at the bar) and beetle-man started explaining to hot-bartender that he'd collected the beetles from his garden to bring down to the guys over at the hardware store to see if they could tell him what they were and what to do about them. I asked if I could look at the bugs, and he began telling me how they were all over his yellow squash, just eating it to pieces, but that the guys at the hardware store told him they were spotted cucumber beetles and that he could spray them with [something I forget] to get rid of them. He'd brought them to the bar in case anyone else wanted to see what they looked like so they could identify them on their own plants. After showing the bugs around for a few minutes, he gave them to the bartender to throw away. The bartender asked, "Should I put a little whiskey in there? Give them a glorious end?" but beetle-man thought that would be unnecessary. So the bartender chucks the pickle jar, and then he goes and pulls out a plastic grocery bag of cucumbers from behind the bar! Some other bar patron had grown them and left them at the bar to be given out to anyone who wanted one. In retrospect, I probably should have taken one, but the pickle jar of cucumber beetles was bizarre enough already, and the production of home-grown cucumbers completely caught me off guard.

This is not something that would happen in Chicago. But I absolutely loved it.

Further successes this week include: Yesterday I walked to the library and got a library card, plus four books (on economics, the Revolutionary War and the Constitution), and a Belgian movie (Le Fils) that looked appealing. Then I got dinner in NoDa at Cabo Fish Taco with Taylor K. who came down for the evening and brought me muffins. This morning I went to Uptown Church, which I think I might go back to next week. It's not Covenant Chicago, but we sang a lot of the same songs (albeit sans the violin/mandolin/accordion/recorder/cello that made music at Covenant so great), and the sermon was some good, solid exegesis on John 15 (I am the vine and you are the branches). The building they meet in has some unbelievably beautiful stained glass and I'm a sucker for a beautiful church. Three people introduced themselves and were very friendly and sincere. Plus, it's a mile-and-a-half from my apartment, which means once it's not hideously hot, I could conceivably walk. Or ride the bike that will also be arriving from Delaware. And then, after church I caught up with Lauren R. for lunch at 300 East in Dilworth. So...all that to say...success! Charlotte's looking pretty fantastic!