What a day.

Spent most the day in a state of vague mopiness, largely associated with entertaining bits of existential reality contemplation and aggravated by not being able to usefully talk about it with relevant party.

Remembered I had leftovers from yesterday for lunch, which was good, as I was having a major case of, 'Waugh, need food, can't figure out what to make, no ability to focus.'

The bonus imp of Kali? Goes to flowers on me within five minutes. A quick check of the ingredients reveals ... musk rose. Genus Rosa, you are my olfactory bane. ::shakes a fist::

Poking at miscellaneous stuff. Went outside (too warm, alas) and cleaned up some of the yard a little, and wound up having a long conversation with the friendly Ukrainian neighbor, who gave me a tour of her garden (with a little sidebar of hunt-the-noun, as we sort of only share about 70% of a common language).

Extracted buckets from teinedreugan's car, though mostly he did the extraction and I wandered around declaiming about grapevines (in the event that they survived the winter; uncertain).

Got the edit back for my article. All good, even if there are a stunning number of little red marks on it. This is why the world has editors.

Went to TI. Assisted arawen with woodworking, mostly by folding paper towels for him to clean up stain with. Noted that the crazed anti-BDSM blogger types I've seen evidence of lately clearly think that I have a far, far more interesting life than I do; arawen suggested writing up the assistance with woodworking in evocatively porny language and posting it to the blog, which is amusing, but which I will probably not do.

Had food. Retreated to have more interesting life. Was mightily amused, or, as arawen put it, "What, that we have hot, sweaty sex and then discuss metaphysics as afterplay?" Also woodworking. Metaphysics and woodworking.

Bwaugh. Just, yeah.

Got home, had teinedreugan explain the complicated Warcraft combat to me. Also discussed changing the sheets on the bed back to the satin ones, as it has hit over eighty (ugh) and thus it is silly to have flannel ones.

Rocks

At the last training retreat for my studies with yezida, I commented that my experience of the apprenticeship program was like carving a farm out of New England: a year of learning the lay of the land, building the house, clearing out a few of the big issues, and then a year of going, "My gods, another rock" as one tries to dig, or plow, or clear out what the frost brought up.

The "rocks in my head" metaphor kept going for many of the people who commented after me.

So today I went and dug holes. I have a pair of grapevines that I got a few years ago, which have lived in a half-barrel type bucket which has now rotted out the bottom. I wanted to put them in the ground somewhere I intended to stay for a while, somewhere they had space to grow.

There's something about claiming the space, treating here as a place to be for a while, that's really potent, really powerful; it's something I tried to write about in my article for RTV, the magical act of treating the place as the right place. Not sure I got it out right, but that's so where my head is these days, with reality and domesticity.

So I dug holes. And pulled out rock after rock after rock -- round ones, big flat ones, things that ground up white against the tip of the shovel. Got a little stack of rocks now.

And vines in the ground. One of which has definite new growth, one of which appears to have buds. I had been worried about them making it through the weird, weird winter.

Vines in the ground, and a little heap of rocks.