A while back I picked up a santa suit – a not-great handmade one, made of an athletic jacket with fake fur stitched around the cuffs and edges. Along with some terrible red 80s pants, and a hat and boots at home, I was all set. The cashier was soooo excited. “Who’s going to be santa??” she sang in an excited voice. “I am,” I said, and she seemed taken aback (I’m not particularly santa-like in appearance). I smiled and paid.

I don’t think she wanted to know it was for a drunken parade full of santas. That is definitely not what she had in mind.

http://moonmustard.blogspot.com/

UPDATE: Moon did not pull through. There is a benefit planned for February, and we are doing what we can to financially and emotionally give support to her husband, Martin. Sad news for our cooperative.

“No, I dinged your car the other day.  Are we still cool?”

Um, WHAT? I haven’t (to my knowledge) been in any accidents in a long time, I don’t know who this person is, how they found me, how we know each other, or whether it was truly my car that was dinged (in full disclosure, my car has had a couple of dings on it, primarily before I bought it. I bought the car when two Subarus in a row were totalled, and I wanted a car I wouldn’t care about the third time. Thus, that is the car that has stuck around. It has done me the favor of running without complain through long commutes, at 38 mpg most of the time, so I can’t complain…but it’s not what you’d call pristine.)

So what am I doing now? I discovered that this person runs a pirate radio show 6-8pm on Saturdays, so I am listening in, trying to identify the voices. Ironically, I discovered this station just this week on my own, when the signal was so strong as I came up to my building that it blocked out the other station I was listening to. In general, I’m liking the music on weeknights, but it’s hard not to imagine that perhaps a neighbor in my building a) runs the radio station and b) dinged my car and c) is hoping the anonymous technique will keep me from reacting strongly.

Still can’t recognize the voice – two men, one married, they like Ladytron. Need more clues. Who dings your car and friends you to let you know? Totally perplexing week.

UPDATE: So this person doesn’t know me, just put out a joke and wants to promote their pirate radio show. For what it’s worth, the programming on the weekdays is pretty good.

The cat has since disappeared, the futon has been completely repaired, and the apartment fix-it dude scratched his head about the backed up drains and blamed the city’s street construction project a block away.

A non-skeptic would blame a poltergeist, but really, what would a poltergeist achieve by harassing in this manner? I’m not afraid of the cat, I knew the futon would need fixing soon, and living in a low-level apartment means plumbing issues on occasion, even if it regulates temperature nicely. Perhaps the coincidences merely push me away from musing about going for the first-time homeowner tax credit…it’s nice to call a dude when your bathroom floods and you have to go to a meeting ASAP. So if a poltergeist exists, it’d have to be a liberatarian conservative, annoyed by swedish furniture, energy efficient sublevel apartments and governments handing out tax credits for simply buying a home. Hmm. I think I’ve strayed further from the believable with this plan. Maybe “stuff breaks” is a more accurate theory.

We had an early frost here – meaning a busy twilight in the garden as everyone hurried to wrap sturdy plants in fabric, cut down weaker plants for the compost pile, and harvest everything possible for a bounty that seemed premature. I felt like I was preparing for a war to hustle among the other quiet and somber gardeners, passing plots that would not survive the night with what I could carry. We did take in ~100 tomatoes, still on big chunks of vine to drape all over the house – a trick I learned from my dad to keep the tomatoes ripening into the autumn. All the basil has been processed with olive oil and put in the freezer, we’ve pickled green tomatoes and brussel sprouts, have a crisper full of bell peppers that never quite reached the promised orange or purple colors, and paper bags full of onions and potatoes. These are all good things, of course.

But an early frost is so frustrating – it feels like a statistical aberration, like losing $500 at the slot machines in your first 20 minutes. Given all the averages, shouldn’t we get a couple more weeks to ripen the crops, enjoy fresh herbs, and maybe coax a few more marigolds and nasturtiums in the shorter days? Apparently not. Nature isn’t into observing averages on a regular basis.

Statistics is a huge (and not displeasing) part of my life right now, given that my new position involves drawing up experiments and checking them for accuracy by comparing their values to previous tests. It is a bizarre thing to realize that when I took engineering statistics in college, apparently it wasn’t the statistics I hated. It was our professor, and the 8am start time of the class (which I think I would still hate now). I’m glad to draw up fancy spreadsheets showing my colleagues with less experience that yep, my chemical concoctions are accurate and precise. Take that, Kompala!

Statistics is something that Sam struggles a little more with. A weekend in Blackhawk where admittedly I expected the odds to be against all visitors, cost Sam $120. The majority of that was for a practice run at poker, something he’s been working on – but like the friends who came with us there are many good poker players who show up at casinos on weekends to take money from those still learning. I respect statistics over skill at corporations that are very good at both, so I played slot machines for 20 minutes, and stopped once I had a $5 profit. Statistics would show a curve of winnings in any casino game that takes relatively little skill, and most of the curve would have me at a loss – so I walked away happy.

Bragging about catching fish is normal, but he had one skill while engaged in fishing that my brother and I found decidely NOT normal. One of his favorite spots near my parents’ place was a lake regularly stocked with fish due to its proximity to a fish hatchery. The lake wasn’t particularly interesting to kids, but it did have crawdads. Crawdads, as the smaller, blue collar version of lobster, were not worth good fishermens’ time to bring them home and fix them for dinner. But my brother and I could poke at them with sticks in the shallow water at least, with their claws swiping hazily at our efforts. But when my grandfather would discover one, he would scoop it up without a word, toss it in his trucker style hat, and plop the hat back on his head. He’d look at us and say, “What? That’s what you do with crawdads!”

Shocked and a little awed at the man who exposed his scalp (for his hair was starting to thin in his 70s) to the pinchers of the small beast, we’d tug on our mom’s shirt, to get her to explain this behavior. More than half the time, she hadn’t seen it, and so didn’t understand our confused looks. The crawdad would be kept under the hat for a while, and returned to the water soon after.

I still don’t know why he’d do that – other than to stop the fussing of his grandkids for a good half hour. And when I see crawdads now, I have a tendency to believe their first use is as something to keep under one’s hat, at least long enough to confuse children.

After cajoling and flattering as much as possible, I was told that there was zero chance of moving to a sunnier plot within the idyllic community garden where I spent the last year. In fact, five of the twenty members had requested the same thing, and yet no one was willing to move from the slightly sunny plots. If 25% of the garden is dissatisfied with the amount of light, that should be a sign: cut down the damn southern trees.

Lucky for the trees, I chose the rational option: I switched gardens. The garden director took pity on me and found me a spot in the next nearest garden, a sunny plot that was recently vacated by a gardener who took very good care of the plot. That last point was repeated to me by every gardener in the vicinity that I have met so far – it’s hard to know whether this is to reassure me that I am getting a good bed, or to reinforce that there are expectations of anyone inheriting such a high quality cache of soil.

So, goodbye to the pretty crocuses, the wrought iron fence that the peas climbed up all spring, the raised beds and pretty memorial roses. I did leave the plot better than I left it: with sturdy rows of onions to harvest later, and a cover crop of winter wheat to add organic material to the soil. My new garden, which really is only farther from home by maybe 0.2 miles, still definitely reachable by bike; is different in the extreme. All plots, which are considered 400 sq. ft. in size (I signed up for a 1/2 plot, twice the size of my old raised bed), are in full sun. There are probably 400 of them and they are in ground, not raised – giving the appearance of having stumbled upon a vagrant’s camp. There are always bits of fabric or plastic to cover early plants, hay bales scattered to create a buffer zone between plots, fences made from random sticks, tattered Tibetan prayer flags and lots of friendly dogs around. But a busy garden is a better garden – gardeners answer questions, they admire crops, and they look out for attacks from wildlife, insects, and (apparently the big problem in this area) drunk teenagers and greedy lazy organic food lovers.

Already I’ve met several of my neighbors, and they’re all quite friendly. There are new options for fancy drip irrigation systems, all heavily subsidized by rebates from the city. I have more than double the space I had before, and it’s ALL IN SUN. That last item alone makes me thrilled to join the new garden tent-city, with visions of fields of basil dancing in my head.

The increasing snow outside, however, makes it difficult to tackle the new list of to-dos: build a fence that might delay deer, double-dig the soil, and plant the first sugar snaps and greens for the early spring. Research drip irrigation systems (they can’t even be used until late May – freezes happen past Mother’s Day here), keep an ear open for getting some free well decomposed manure, and pick up a wonderful donation of several Walls-of-Water or similar item from a friend’s mom who knows her stuff and is just that kind. I am so ready for garden time – even if it’s done in between snow storms for now.

Those two kids egged on the boy, insisting he return letters, send mix tapes of his high school radio show, and ditch school to meet them for slurpees or other ridiculous activities not usually considered worth driving 100 miles round trip for.

One of the kids had a high school friend who loved designing and making costumes.

Time for college came, and the kids headed to different schools: across Colorado, Utah, Rhode Island….

The second kid reached junior year in college, and needed a roommate. Luckily, the two campmates bumped into each other at an outdoor concert the summer before and mentioned the need for a roommate. Turned out that the costume design friend was moving back to Colorado, and set to start that fall at the same school and needed housing as well. Trusting the camp friend’s judgement without a second thought, the costume designer and the second kid became roommates.

They had many parties, with many great costumes…

And along the way, the original friendships from camp held together – including visits to each other’s schools and more often, invitations for the boy to come to the theme parties. By this time, his DJ skills were definitely developing.

College finished for the kid from camp, and graduation meant a trip away from the state for graduate school. There were tears as what was a very fun household broke up for everyone to go their separate ways. However, the kid from camp came back a few months later to see friends, and in the usual way, gathered together as many friends as possible for a short in-town visit, whether or not they usually hung out together in the kid’s absence.

Somewhere along the way, the costume design girl and the boy from camp had noticed all the neat things about each other – and seemed to share a certain goofiness, an interest in similar music, and it wasn’t long before they started dating.

15 days ago, these two people got married – in a beautiful 1920s ceremony complete with handmade dresses for the bride and her bridesmaids, and guests turned out in bowlers, flapper dresses, and long satin gloves to dance, eat cake, and celebrate most of the night. It is hard to believe that now a lifetime together can happen because of a spark from two people I met 15 years ago and helped introduce to each other.
Congratulations, S & N.