Spring is here!

I caught a cold and am unemployed, so today I’m puttering around the house.  Both our pots are simmering sleepily on the stove (the wok has the night off), the kitchen is scrubbed, and I just vacuumed.  Cleaning under the bed I am amazed at what a hairy mammal I am (our dust bunnies are actually their taxonomic cousins, hair bunnies).

Puttering around being domestic is fun!  Women really had it made until feminism went and screwed it all up for them.

It’s been salaciously good weather lately.  Fondling breezes and licking sunshine, that type of thing.  Flowers showing up like popcorn when you put too many kernels in the pan and walked away.  (Just cooperate and pretend you cook your popcorn on the stove, please.)  Spring is in the air, suckers!  With weather this nice it is actually kind of embarrassing to have a cold.  It seems like a really lame joke, like CEO-at-the-annual-company-conference bad.  Or an anachronism, I’m sitting in commuter traffic in a covered wagon.  The cold dates to a previous era, which most people have moved away from.  Maybe it’s just kind of like wearing…at this point I would put in some laughably obvious fashion mistake of the late 90’s but unfortunately I’m fashion-blind.  Sorry.  Tapered jeans?

But Spring is here with a friendly vengeance and the Belgians are emerging from their brick caves, white legs under dusty shorts, pale collar bones over new summer dresses (which they started selling well before the weather actually warmed up).  Today marked the glorious return to my life of the sound of flip-flops against the bottoms of my feet, and I rousted out my favorite pair of shorts from their hibernation in my backpack up in the attic.

…mmm…  It was nice to see my backpack too…

Here's part of the downtown area of my Belgian stomping grounds.  My grass stains today were acquired on that grass, and my caffeine buzz in that terrace-cafe.

Flip flop flip flop.  Sounds good.

I wore the new Moroccan ones I bought in Fes last summer, and they stained a wide strip across the top of my foot a nice tannery chemical red.  I feel like using it to kick someone who goes on and on about the free market.  Does the free market keep businesses from staining your feet with who-knows-what chemical?  Nope.

K bought a mud facial mask thing in Marrakech too, which actually came from India, and I won’t let her use it.  It is just too easy to imagine it being full of lead, mercury, and…I dunno…pigeon shit (oh wait, that’s the tannery).  Am I being paranoid?  Racist?  Funny how those two go together so often.

But that tannery gunk soaked into my skin reminded me of the children hanging out in the streets around the tannery in Fes…  Please read it without even a trace of levity when I say that I want to work with an NGO to fight birth defects.

But I am getting way off track.  Sorry about that.  I have been utterly mentally constipated lately, hence no blogs, and I feel the need to just put something on here, for crying out loud.  I have tried a few times over the past few weeks and have nonsensical little half-files cluttering up my desktop.  That thing about the weather was the most coherent of the batch, but now I’ve gone and rambled off.

So I’m gonna throw this mess up on blogspot and go read in the sun.  Barefoot.  And that's cool with me.