hello: guess who!

I have done so many notable things in the last few weeks, it's truly hard to know where to start.

I bought my first pair of hybrid spandex-"booty shorts" so that when I bike in a dress and flash people, it's just a touch less inappropriate. (I am questioning if this was the right place to start this list of "notables.")

I also discovered what is my new favorite salad recipe and have been telling everyone I know about this delicious creation. (Second time I've mentioned it in this blog, in fact.) The dressing alone is worth making again and again and putting on anything and everything. If my housemate hadn't been sitting nearby, I would have been tempted attempted to drink it like a savory smoothie.

My garden is finally starting to take off and I am finally starting to let go of the fact that a large portion of it continues to be bunny food. Let's be real: for me it's not as much about the harvest as it is about the experience of growing things. This week's notable crop: raspberries. (Also: bunnies don't give a sh** about raspberries.)

I went to a department store where I had what some might consider an "intimate moment" with Deb in "Intimate Apparel." I had been wearing the wrong bra size!! Now my girls are much more comfortable in the correct bra size and I have "getting felt up by a senior citizen" crossed off my bucket list.

Last week I stood very close to Amy Sedaris at an event and realized she is my spirit animal and her humor is perfect. I just love people who see the world through a very quirky, very honest lens. I am trying to figure out if snorting-laughter at a work event - where I'm technically "working" - is unprofessional. Oh well.

I continue to slowly read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Slowly because it's so good I want to make it last. Slowly because it's the perfect book about summer to read on a very hot summer night, on my front porch swing with a glass of lemonade, sweating bullets because it's 95 degrees at 8pm. If that sounds unpleasant, you misunderstood me. Reading it like this actually has added - or transported me to - the world of the book. The introduction, written by the author himself, in the "grand master edition" is one of the most beautiful pieces of honest reflection I have ever read. An excerpt:

What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.

So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn't stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents' northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of a letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows.

I mean, come on now. Beautiful. 

Moving on from writing-so-beautiful-it-makes-me-come-alive, here's something mundane: I just made my first ever jello salad for an Independence Day party. Red-white-and-blue(berry) to be specific.

Speaking of Independence Day, I also made good on one of my promises to myself and, not to under emphasize this moment, one of the motivations behind this blog. I got a very new, very cute, very versatile, mint-green.....

Hello ugly robe. Independence day symbolic activities are my favorite!