Tag: David

A Lot of Effort for Some Boxes

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So, I’ve never been that much of a recycler.

Or rather, David never has been and so I easily fell out of the habit once we were living together. He became quickly annoyed at the accumulating sacks of newspapers, cans and bottles. Granted, recycling was a pain in Laramie. For a long time you could only take recyclables to a certain place during certain hours of weekday afternoons. Even when they finally set up bins, those were usually full.

David liked to grump that he saw the recycle place hauling truckloads out to the landfill all the time. He particularly liked to tease our more avid recycling friends about it. They would frown, uncertain if he was making it up or not.

At any rate, like many things, it was easier not to and so I stopped.

Now, I work for an environmental consulting firm and the company is big on green policies. Which I suppose is only good and right. We have to purchase 100% recycled paper for our printers, should we be so wasteful as to print something out in the first place. We have to recycle our used paper, etc. And we have to take these pledges.

Well, we don’t have to, but we’re exhorted to. And if you know anything about me at all, I’m just not the kind of gal you force into making pledges.

But every year there’s this big campaign where, in order to support the efforts of a major client, we have to go on the internet and pledge to replace our lightbulbs with the energy-savings ones. My boss, Laurie, who is fortunately also my friend, is probably shaking her head reading this, because she’s heard me go on about the lightbulbs. At length. Maybe with the teensiest bit of ranting.

Suffice to say: I do not like them.

I do not like them in my house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them because they make everything look green: eggs, ham, art and people.

Laurie doesn’t get me on this. The aesthetic doesn’t bother her. But this is also the woman who reuses corners of paper and the back of Post-It notes. She’s literally taken balled-up used sticky notes out of my trash, smoothed them out and used them for notes. Yes, we’ve discussed her issues, too.

So, a few years ago, I caved, I did the pledge, and bought my two ugly-making lightbulbs. Laurie archly asked me if I actually installed them. I replied that I did: in the basement laundry room. (Laundry rooms are supposed to have icky awful lighting – it’s practically a law.) She conceded that was good enough. Then the next year rolls around and we have to pledge again, what with more bulbs. I started to run out of icky places to put the bulbs.

This year’s drive wound up yesterday. Only now they have this whole list of things you can do to be more green. Laurie commented that it’s getting harder to show movement each year. Which is true – I actually already do everything on that list except the freaking lightbulbs. The ones I left behind in the old house when we moved. To help the new people be green, I told Laurie.

She suggested I put their names on the pledge.

I turn off unused lights and appliances. I keep thermostats low and turned down during low-use times. Growing up in the Western drought of the 70s, I’m a habitual water-saver. One friend gets irritated that I turn the water on and off when I do dishes. “Why don’t you just let it keep running?” she asks. Because I can’t.

And now we have curbside recycling, so we do that, too! Amusingly, I even mentioned this once before on the blog. Back in August David and I were going back and forth on recyclables that don’t fit in the bin. Which brings us to yesterday.

Remember how I bought all that nifty new patio furniture? Well, it came in great big boxes. Heavy-duty cardboard ones. Our recycle pick-up comes every two weeks, so two weeks ago, I set two giant boxes filled with smaller scraps of cardboard next to the bin for pick up.

Shockingly the Waste Management guys did not take them.

(If you watch Breaking Bad, you can see our New Mexico Waste Management trucks. Kind of thrilling, no? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But it’s funny to us.)

We had a rainy day last week and David told me I should put those boxes out in the rain so they’d soften up and he could tromp them down and put them in the garbage bin. Our recycle bin gets really full at the end of two weeks. I said, no, I was going to break the boxes down and set them out for recycle again this week. “A lot of effort for some boxes,” he says and I said I didn’t mind.

So I spent a bunch of time cutting up and breaking down the boxes, bundling them into neat stacks, tied up with rope. With carry handles even. And we set them next to the very full recycle bin for pick up yesterday. The Waste Management guy arrives, sits for easily five minutes on his radio (I can spy on this from my office window). He backs the truck up like he’s leaving, then he pulls forward again, gets out, contemptuously kicks aside my careful bundles of cardboard and lets the automatic truck arm empty the bin. And drives away.

David says, “That’s why I wanted you to put that stuff in the rain so I could have tromped it down and put it in the garbage.”

I should insert here that today is David’s second-to-last day of finals and he’s hitting full grumpitude saturation at this point. I’m not calling him on it because, well, I’m understanding and loving like that. So, I don’t say anything to this.

I call Waste Management, very nice girl tells me that, yeah, in Santa Fe they’ll take only what’s in the bin. I ask if I’m supposed to cut these boxes into tiny pieces and dole them into the recycle bin over the course of months and she responds brightly that that’s a great idea.

I tell her not so much.

So she tells me that I can drop the stuff off at the county. Coincidentally, the place is right by where I have a salon appointment that day anyway. I put the top down on the Jag, pull to the end of the driveway and load the cardboard into the back. David helps, grumbling that it’s an awful lot of effort for some boxes at which point I, maybe not quite so lovingly, tell him that I don’t mind, I’ll do it myself and to go back in the house to study. He says, “Okay, I won’t say another word.” And I, very lovingly, do not say “Hallelujah!”

It goes downhill from there. The place the chirpy Waste Management girl sends me too is the lovely county office with no recycling facilities in evidence. I end up talking to the County Manager, who’s a terrific gal and says “I do not know what is wrong with those people at Waste Management!” She draws me a map to the transfer station, by the landfill, by the dog park, all places I haven’t been to yet.

So, yes, I drive out to the landfill in my Jag convertible, packed to the rim with cardboard pieces. The woman at the gate takes one look at me, says “let me guess” and waves me through. I find the big bin o’cardboard, where a very earthy/crunchy young man is emptying his vehicle of rectangles like mine. We stand in the sun and companionably toss cardboard into the bin.

And yes, I felt pleased with myself.

True to his promise, David didn’t say another word about it, so I don’t have to ‘fess up to the further complications, which would have truly driven him over the wall. I’ll have to think up another reason for why I now know where the landfill and the dog park are.

The pledge checklist doesn’t include a category for “went to a lot of effort for some boxes,” but I’m feeling like a good kitty-cat this Earth Day.

The best part? I didn’t have to buy any of those stinking lightbulbs!

Wuv. Twue Wuv

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David and I have been talking about the nature of love, lately.

I think I’ve mentioned it, in reference to other conversations. But this, of course, is the WEEKEND OF LOVE, what with Valentine’s Day and all. The mentions of it have become truly relentless.

Two of the gals David goes to school with asked him what he’s doing for me for Valentine’s. Another took him aside to ask what she should get for her guy that he would like. It’s funny: at 50, David is everyone’s father figure. He gave her good advice though. He suggested some things I’d done for him that he liked and she was pleased.

I told David, though, that I don’t really want anything for Valentine’s this year. It just seems silly. (Plus, I hadn’t been thinking about getting him anything!) David said he’d tried to explain that to the gals who asked, that doing something for each other on a particular day seems kind of false after so many years together. Whereas last week I was feeling sad and friendless (woe is me) and had a little crying jag at bedtime. And he was sweet to me and comforted me. That meant the world. More than flowers and candy on the designated day.

It occurs to me that Valentine’s Day meant much more to me when I didn’t have a special someone. I recall the agonies in school, wondering if I would get a carnation from someone besides my best friend. I’d watch the cheerleaders walk around with their buckets of tributes and wonder when someone would love me. Later, in college and grad school, when I was more often single than not, I would be fine with what I was doing, until Valentine’s Day rolled around to remind me that I was alone.

Otherwise I never felt alone.

Now that I have David, who is so central to my life, I don’t find that Valentine’s Day validates anything. In some ways, it’s just for show. Send me flowers so I can prove to the world that I’m loved.

The funny thing is, when you love and are truly loved in return? You don’t have to demonstrate it to anyone.

Perky

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I don’t believe in writer’s block so much.

But there are certainly days when the words flow and days when they don’t so much. I don’t really understand why.

Some mornings I wake up knowing what I’ll write in the blog — down to particular words and phrases. Other days, like today, my brain doesn’t seem to have much in the way of thoughts, much less words. Sometimes, like today, I’ll plug in the camera and see if I took a picture I forgot about, which is often the case. This was sunrise on Wednesday. A subtle rose and gold one, full of promise. Of course, that day the promise turned out to be full-on meetings, so I never did get to sit and write. What was on the camera got lost in the busyness of the day.

Which was okay. Consulting is a feast or famine gig and the beginning of the year tends to be lean. More work is always better. As it is, people in the company are sniffing around the corners of the hallways (this is completely metaphorical since many of us, like me, work from home), searching out crumbs of work. The fear level is higher this year, with the backdrop of financial uncertainty. (I would make an extreme promise to scream the next time I see or hear the phrase “in this economy,” but since I know it’s likely to be in the next hour, I must be Zen. See my serene smile?)

Cynthia Eden, a fine writer and a really lovely friend, says she’s sneaking out of town this weekend, in the hopes that a change of scenery will perk her up. She lives in Florida, so I imagine her heading to the beach, which sounds really wonderful.

I suspect we all need perking up this time of year. Whether it’s the low light or, for those of us in winter, being stuck indoors a lot, January is just a long and unperky month.

It seems inescapable that our moods cycle. I think often of people who are chronically ill and how their caretakers will always refer to “good days” and “bad days.” David, who likes to find a reason for everything, says that something must affect people to make some days good and others bad. Okay, maybe. But whether it’s biorhythms or the chemistry of what you ate last night or the barometric pressure or whether you produced enough endorphins from running or whatever, it remains that we all have good days and bad days. Those of us lucky enough to be healthy just experience this as feeling up or kind of blue.

We just don’t get to be perky every day. Not without chemical assistance.

The challenge is to salvage what you can from the non-perky days. Take the time to rest. Forge ahead anyway. Do like Cynthia and find a change of scenery.

The perky is out there. Even in this economy.

Hungry for those Good Things, Baby

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Yesterday was our anniversary — 19 years now.

And yes, I’d planned this blog post for yesterday, but I had an early meeting in downtown Santa Fe that expanded ever outwards and kept me there until 4:30.

So, January 27 for us, which was Superbowl Sunday back in 1991. It’s hard for me to see how nearly twenty years have gone by, how it’s possible that the 90s aren’t recent years.

I’m very lucky to have found him and spent these years together.

The night before last, we watched Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I love that David doesn’t complain about watching movies like that with me. Of course, anything with some comedy and lots of pretty women is generally good for him.

I recall a few years back, David went hunting with a divorced bachelor friend. They were up in the mountains for a week, doing the guy thing and came back all scruffy and pleased with themselves. We saw on the patio in the warm Autumn sunshine and they told me about the week. The friend said that he was amazed that I didn’t pitch a fit about David taking off for a week like his ex-wife would have. And how, when he’d mentioned it to David, he’d said “I do what I want to.” I expressed surprise that anyone would think I’d try to stop David from doing something he enjoyed. (Besides, a week to myself to write? Sign me up!) Then David asked me what I wanted to do that night and I said “Oh! Wimbledon is at the movie theater — Paul Bettany! I want to see that.” David said okay and the friend starting laughing, slapping his knee. “Oh yeah!” he says, “you do what you want, all right.”

And, I thought, you just don’t get it.

After Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was over, we sat and sipped some brandy and talked about love. This is another thing I love about David. We talked about the theme in the movie — and this is a Spoiler Alert, if it’s possible to spoil a plot as pat as that one — that somehow the childhood love is purer and more meant to be than any other. Which I just don’t buy. I don’t like it in romance novels, the instant mate bond/fated love kind of thing. I much prefer when strangers come together, have to learn each other, have to learn to accommodate each other and earn the love.

David told me that Osho, one of his current favorites, says that the sensation of falling in love, of the irresistible passion, the Meant for Each Other, instant mate bond kind of thing is all unconscious. That people should aspire to upward love, which is about conscious choice.

When people ask me our “secret,” our special formula for our happy relationship, this is what I want to explain to them. It’s about being happy doing what makes the other person happy. It’s about making conscious choices to be together and enjoy each other.

It’s about upward love.

Real Passion

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It’s been retro week on Facebook.

What, you didn’t know??

We were to replace our profile pics with ones from when we were younger. My problem is, I haven’t scanned in any of my old photos and the ones I used to have out are boxed up. Not from moving laziness, but on purpose. We like the clean walls of this house. And, with the way the views fill the rooms, it doesn’t look right to have too much stuff inside competing.

So I was judicious in what I’ve hung up and put out. Those old family pics from when I was a kid? Eh. In the archives.

But one of my sorority sisters has been clever enough to scan in some of our old photos and sent me some.

So now I’m cruising on nostalgia. That guy in the photo was my Great Passion. Fantastic lover, stand-up comic and alcoholic. He broke my heart twice. I have a long-standing rule of never getting back together with someone after the break-up. I firmly believe that whatever caused you to break up in the first place will still be there. He’s the only one I violated the rule for and, guess what?

I suppose sometimes you have to test your own rules, to verify the truth of them.

He’s since fallen off the face of the earth. I sometimes wonder if he’s self-destructed. There’s another one I wonder about sometimes. Another passionate and dysfunctional relationship. Must be a theme.

I remember when a counselor told my mother “we seldom marry our great passions.” Which I think is true. The men who give us the roller-coaster ride of passion are not usually the men who are good for the day-in/day-out routine of grocery shopping and alarm-setting.

While I know romance novels are about the fantasy, this aspect sometimes bothers me. When the relationship is SO turbulent, romantic and passionate, I sometimes get hung up on whether the happily-ever-after will stick. For me, I really need to believe in the reality of the story, to really enjoy the fantasy.

Funny — when I started this post, I didn’t intend to converge with Allison’s post today, though I did read it while writing this, and while chatting with her on IM. Interesting how the mind works that way. Of course, she also had to point out that she was in 6th grade when this photo was taken. Which just means she was a snot-nosed brat when I was a sophisticated young woman.

That’s the other thing I’ve learned from nostalgia: it’s easy to look back and think how young and pretty I was then. Something I didn’t know. I didn’t think I was, at all. It’s another way to bend what’s real, our perceptions of ourselves. Now I just try to appreciate how I look, since I know I’ll look back later and wonder why I worried that I was too fat or too pimply or what have you.

Maybe part of the trick is embracing reality for what it offers. David cooks dinner most nights and is a lover to me in a way only someone you’ve been with for almost twenty years can be. When I have early meetings, he brews Earl Grey for me and puts in in my favorite thermos.

It might not make for the stuff of novels, but it is truly romantic.

True Love

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“Well, Sundance, at least we have enough ammo to hold off the Bolivian Army.”

This is what I was planning to say to David when I came back into the house after organizing the garage. I had the words all picked out, amused myself terribly as I worked, but then I couldn’t quite tease him about it.

Contrary to some opinion, I do hold my tongue now and then.

However, I did tell David that I thought he was the worst packer on the face of the Earth. This is after I suggested throwing his old suitcase into the BB/BS donation pile for tomorrow morning, and he said there was stuff in it and I said, no, I checked and PUT AWAY the collection of BULLETS, CARTRIDGES, NAILS and SCREWS.

I kid you not. The suitcase was full of this stuff.

He says, “I had no choice about that.”

Which makes me laugh, because he totally means it. He means that, faced with drawers of random hardware condiments and ammunition, on a short timeline — and, oh my god, our timeline was short — that throwing a chunk of it into his broken old suitcase would seem inevitable.

In a month, we’ll have been together for 19 years. So, this is all stuff I know about him. One of my first published essays was called “Bullets,” and was about dating a man who had shotgun cartridges rolling around in his truck.

Of course, even though he doesn’t hunt anymore, we have plenty of ammo.

Which I packed away, in my organized fashion, into the plastic bin labelled “hunting supplies.” If/when he asks me where it all is, I can tell him. Because, you know, he will ask. Though I must grant that he remembered which broken suitcase he’d stowed it in. And I’m pretty sure that was late on the last Thursday, just before we closed the truck and left the house forever. Right after I asked him if he’d packed the stuff in his drawers in the basement. An ingenuous question on my part, because I knew perfectly well he hadn’t.

Which is why he had no choice and why I shouldn’t be surprised to find it.

All I can say is, if we move to Bolivia?

We’re taking nothing and starting fresh.

Thanks for All the Fish

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I had this vague Idea that I would write a Thanksgiving post.

I mean, I didn’t do the whole Facebook thing of daily posting what I was thankful for, because, hey I have a blog and would write all about that. In my own time.

Which turns out to be days later.

I did post that I was considering just reverting to childhood at my mother’s house, which would consist of lying about reading and generally being a parasite.

The beauty of the adult version of this is, you get to drink beer, too!

So, yes, this is what happened to my Thanksgiving post. I was sitting in the sun on the patio, drinking beer that my wonderful Stepfather Dave stocked in his special Corona cooler, reading and being a parasite. Here is my list of thankfuls for that:

To my mom, for making sure I got to relax;
To Dave, for being a great host and for putting up with HER side of the family;
To David, my love, for being the kind of guy who loves to sit and read on the patio with me;
To the sun, for shining.

I wasn’t a complete loser, but I came quite close. Somewhere around the Monday of Thanksgiving week, between emails and phone calls, it occurred to me that my mother hadn’t even mentioned the dinner menu, much less asked me for input.

This is what’s known in the business as a Bad Sign.

When I asked my mom about the plans for the holiday meal, she replied that Thanksgiving is a slam dunk, she and Hope had it handled. So, while I did make my cranberry/pear chutney on Thanksgiving Day, it was an afterthought. Here’s me, in my desultory cooking, laptop at the ready. And no, my mother’s kitchen is never that cluttered. That’s my fault, too. Thus I am thankful:

To Hope, best stepsister anyone could ask for, for stepping up when I didn’t;
To my mom, who never once bugged me about the dinner menu and who just wanted me to relax.

So, while I managed to make chutney, consult on the stuffing and set the table — yes, I was totally 13 again — I was worthless this Thanksgiving. Even for giving thanks.

In the end? Hands-down winner: I’m thankful for my mom. Who promises that I get to make it all up by hosting Christmas. And she won’t do anything, especially not scrubbing my stove top in the middle of the night.

I love you Mom!

Photographic Evidence

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We knew we had a packrat here from the first day.

Well, second day, really. Since our actual first day involved the drive from hell, parking the U-Haul in the driveway, going to the closing from hell, cooking a frozen pizza and unloading enough of the U-Haul to find our bed and then crashing in it.

So, it was really the second day that David rounded the corner to see a pack rat cheerfully trotting up the U-Haul ramp to see what goodies we might have for him. The sight of David threw him into a frenzy, of course, and he bolted for the nearby desert shrubbery.

But we didn’t give it much thought.

Until David notifed the garbage pen was filling up with dead chunks of cholla.

“I thought the woman was trying to booby trap me with cactus!” he says to me.

“What?” (And, yes, this is really how he talks to me.)

“In the garbage. I wondered what you were doing, sticking all that dead cholla in there for me to trip over.”

“I haven’t been putting any cholla in there!”

“I know that now — it’s the pack rat.”


Now, we won’t say anything about David assuming that I would just randomly pile cactus pieces around the garbage cans. Or that he, probably grumpily cursing my name, which he now has to make up to me with all kinds of sweetness to balance the relationship karma again, bagged up all the cholla so I didn’t get a good picture of the incipient nest. David figured it out the next day, when there were a couple of new, carefully placed pieces of dead cholla, as seen here. Apparently David decided that even I, in my random garbage pen activities, wouldn’t do this kind of thing.

So he put the new wildlife camera in the garbage pen. It’s one of those infrared cameras, that’s motion sensitive. David’s been hopeful of snapping the coyotes, bobcats or screen-surveying mountain lions, but so far all he’s caught are birds and our own domestic wildlife, like the top pic of Isabel.

I did helpfully put up my purple lizard beanie-doll in front of the camera when he went to the store, since David was so disappointed not to have any good animal pics yet. The photo was hysterical, but he deleted it. He assures me that his deleting it is not an editorial comment and that he does still think I’m funny after all these years. He even offered to redo the photo, so I could post it here, but I thought the spontaneity would be lacking and you’d all notice it was staged.

Alas.

Anyway, as you can see, he got a photo of the rat. Several in fact. Here’s a close-up.

Not a real pack rat, after all. In one of the pics, which is quite blurry, so I won’t bother putting it here, you can see an incriminating chunk of dead cholla in his mouth.

I am vindicated.

But contemplating filling the garbage pen with purple lizard beanie dolls…

Lions and Arbors and Boxes.

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Saturday morning, writing under the grape arbor.

David is sitting with me reading Osho. Teddy is laying on the cool flagstone, Zipper beside her. Isabel, the ever independent, is out front hoping the baby quail show up again. They appeared yesterday for the first time, bobbling along behind the older quail, like fluffy bit of popcorn on toothpicks. Isabel was electrified by the sight.

No baby quail snacks in her future, however.

The quail are smart enough to know when she’s out there, and she can only go out in bright light. I keep dreaming at night that she’s caught outside. David, too, has been waking to the coyote howls and getting up to make sure she’s still inside. In the same way the animals have been unsettled, he’s been nervous in this new environment. Uncertain how to best protect us all. Isabel is always sitting in a window, watching the night.

“Would a coyote try to get Isabel through the screen?” I wondered.

“That’s why I have the rifle, two sticks and my pistol under the bed,” David said.

I had previously commented on the unprecedented number of weapons under our bed here.

“To beat the coyotes off Isabel?”

“More if a mountain lion comes through the screen.”

“I think if someone in Eldorado had a mountain lion come through their screen, we would have heard the story,” I told him.

“Fine, make fun,” he answered. “But if a mountain lion DOES come through the screen, I’ll be ready. “

I know he’ll settle down as he gets into the groove. I must constantly remind myself that David has never moved to a totally new place. The biggest move he’s made before this was from Buffalo, Wyoming to Laramie, Wyoming.

We have recycling pick-up here, which we ain’t never done had afore back in ol’ Wyo. We signed up for it, for an additional $4.87/month, which seems like a great deal to me. They gave us a green can for recyclables, that’s slightly smaller than the one for garbage. They pick up on a different day for that one, and only every two weeks. David fretted about remembering the dates until I put them in my Outlook calendar with a day-before reminder.

Last Wednesday was our first pick-up. Since he’s got time until classes start, he spent several hours Tuesday breaking down moving boxes, since they recycle cardboard. But there was too much to fit in the can.

“Just stack up the extra next to the can,” I offered. “Worst they can do is not take it.”

But he didn’t like that idea. He took Zip out and drove around the neighborhood to see how the other neighbors did it.

“I wonder if tomorrow is the right day,” he said when he returned.

“It is,” I answered without looking up from my laptop.

“Only three other neighbors have green cans out.”

“Maybe not everyone has the same pick-up day. Maybe not everyone pays the extra to recycle.”

“Well, none of them had extra stuff next to their cans.”

At least he was satisfied that enough people put theirs out the night before that he was okay there. The next morning when we went running, I pointed out another green can, about three blocks away.

“I counted that one,” he told me.

“Jeez — how far did you go?”

“A ways. I wanted to get a good survey of how everyone was doing it.”

“Why do you even care how the neighbors do it?” I asked.

“I just want to make sure to be doing things the right way.”

“I’m going to have to write about this in my blog, you know,” I told him.

“I know — I don’t care.”

And he doesn’t. One of the things I love best about David is he doesn’t mind me writing about him. This is an incredibly valuable trait in someone who shares their life with a writer, especially an essayist.

That, and that he’ll protect me from the mountain lion coming through the screen.

The Longest Day

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Yesterday was a kind of harmonic convergence of events. Summer solstice, Father’s Day and our grandson’s first birthday.

Here’s Tobiah, with his paternal grandfather, Miguel.

Normally Tobiah is quite a bit more jovial than this, but my step-daughter, Lauren, reported that he’d been cranky that day. Not everyone loves a party.

I got to stop by for a few minutes, on the drive to Santa Fe, to drop off some presents from David and me. I asked Lauren if the year had gone fast for her, too. She said it had flown by. She even looked a little dizzy, thinking about it.

A year ago, David and I were in Victoria, when Lauren’s boyfriend, Damion called us in the early morning to say Tobiah had been born. We lay there watching the morning light over the Japanese gardens at Laurel Point Inn and the Inner Harbor beyond. We’d visited acupuncture schools the day before and David had clicked with the one in Victoria. Our world had shifted, in several profound ways. Now David thought about teaching Tobiah to fish in the lovely, gentle seascape of Vancouver Island.

I admire what Lauren has accomplished. She has a challenging career and a new baby. She and Damion are learning to build their lives together. Juggling all the families can’t be easy. But Lauren cheerfully makes room for everyone who wants to be part of Tobiah’s life. It takes an openness of heart for that, along with a stern resolve.

So Happy Father’s Day to the fathers: Damion, Miguel, David. Happy First Day of Summer to us all — may we have some now, for all of us who’ve had such a cold and rainy June. Hopefully the light of the longest day shone with radiance for you.

And Happy First Birthday, little Mowgli-baby!