…I made no friends. But I did make some dope cash, which made up for Goethe’s Hulk-out face smashery and when the water heater popped this winter. Tomorrow’s my last day here. They wanted to kick my contract out to August, which is nice I suppose. But I have to get on with my life.

Plus my online math class is going to “expire” in June, so I need to finish that as well. I really need to do something (for money) that I give some fucks about at this point, now that my girls are so big, and not just collect a paycheck. I give many fucks about my 4 million hobbies, but they fall into the expense column.

Separated at birth???

Franny was gone this weekend being miserable at her dad’s house, sadly, and we went off and ran a local 5K run by a doughnut company. I have no pictures, because my sister and I got our timing off kilter and she actually wasn’t at the finish line. I thought she might have been ill or caught in traffic so we waited for a bit and then went back to the car to grab my phone…and there she was at the finish line wondering where we were. I was so fast I finished in record time! Just kidding, I was slow like a turtle.

I have yet to meet a database that won’t mongle my name. One of my diplomas came misspelled like this even. Ha.

Strudel took off like a shot at the beginning to find her friends and finished before we did, and was waiting for us at the finish line, alone.

“How’s it going,” I said, when I picked her face out of the crowd.

“Bad. I’ve been here for like 15 minutes and I can’t find Auntie Morgan,” she complained. We checked her time later and she finished only five minutes before we did. Each minute is multiplied by three when you’re ten I guess.

P. is asking me when we are going to run our next 5K, and I say, “I’m not sure.” There were things I liked about it and things I didn’t.

Like:

Greenlake is REALLY flat, so there was a sense of ease

I got a cool shirt

Did not like:

The 11-year-old who kept dashing ahead of us and then would stop to walk right in front of us

I did my duty and brought a cool story about a woman whose dog punched her in the stomach after anal sex and she shit herself, which effectively rendered him speechless and unable to think of anything to talk about, which made the first mile slow. I thought it would help to have conversational topics!

Strollers, and people who think four-year-olds will run a 5K. You can barely cajole those beasts into dressing themselves

Paying for something I can do in my own neighborhood for free felt dumb and the doughnuts smelled disgusting when we came around the last bend

I had a good time, though. And then Morgan and I caught up and she came to my house for brunch.

The day before, we worked the bees and then P. took off to the local tool rental place and got a tiller.

“You’re going to till up the backyard the day before we have this race?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. I watched him crank it up and his arms start shaking and I was like, “That guy is going to be sore tomorrow,” and he was!

Taking a wee break.

He got as close as he dared to the beehives. They did not care for a gas-powered tiller narming up the dirt around their house. So I get the little spit of land in front of their houses. I forgot to snap a finished picture, but I put in foxglove, bee balm, shasta daisy, alyssum, lupin, black-eyed susans, and something I’m probably forgetting. He put six tomato plants in the larger chunk of land. We pretty much used up the original garden, between the kiwis, medlar, fig, hives, and where the tomatoes were last year is full of a rotation of crimson clover (which is about to bloom, squee).

I let the chickens out to scratch it all up, figuring it couldn’t hurt. They were really into actual grass so I had to lure them to the dirt using some flung pepitas.

I am excited to get rid of my jank, broken decaying ye olde patio crap. I finally pulled the trigger on a new table that will hold guests and some chairs that were not free ten years ago and are now falling apart and have been spraypainted in a hail mary attempt to not make my backyard look like West Virginia (as P. says, who lived there). All the furniture came yesterday and Strudel and I were unpacking it as the afternoon rain started.

I opened the table box and realized it was already open and the table’s corner was munged. It was packed very poorly.

I have such a thrift store/vintage/freecycle mentality that sometimes it is hard for me to decide to buy something new, and I fret over purchases for weeks. So long that the first table I wanted sold out for the year, ha. I had a little tear to see this and I felt foolish for not just finding some old, pre-scratched, less-broken-than-the-previous-stuff crap somewhere.

Of course since I had all the furniture and it was raining, I realized the cover hadn’t shipped yet. I put the cushions indoors and before an actual human who worked to pay for them could enjoy them, BEHOLD, A WILD NIGHTMERE APPEARS. BOOOOO. She colonizes eveything.

And then there’s the shopping cart issue still, speaking of jank…I need to take this back to the store it came from a couple of neighborhoods over. I was going to turn it into a shopping cart made of succulents, but I have no idea where I’d put it.

“Weh! Mom, I’m a baby!” Oh god no. That performance probably caused the final death knell of my ovaries.