fflo | ficus tree

I got me a ficus tonight. It's a good time for one, I'm thinkin', beyond the fact that Ikea is more or less between here & the airport, where I put

shmizla on a plane this evening.

Ficus trees, I remember hearing, are sensitive, and often lose all their leaves when you move them. It can seem as if they've bit the dust, or damned near. Yet the post-shock ficus will likely be fine in its new situation, once settled in, though it might not look that way for a bit.

So, yeah, O is off for a month, before being back a while, then being gone-daddy gone. (That song was playing in Ikea.) I've been spending a fair amount of time with her recently, though, which is nice. Including some of the visiting bookseller time---my bookseller buddy and his bookseller buddy were in town this past weekend for the antiquarian book fair. That was a good time. Book stuff, going to eat, going for drinks---and just the being with guys, as well as with such a beloved guy.

Somewhere in there I also went to a social gathering at the (very welcoming) home of the would-be judge I'd done the petitioning for. Seemed like good folk there.

Friday night was

bigfinedaddy's choral concert. Kicked off the weekend with a sense of festivity, for sure. I liked becoming familiar with the singers' faces as the songs went by. The experience has, however, left me since then periodically singing to myself that song from Pippin:

Join us
Leave your fields to flower
Join us
Leave your cheese to sour
Join us
Come and waste an hour or two
Doodle-ee-do

A whole buncha people shouldn't have to sing "Doodle-ee-do" in unison. Can't be done without being cringingly dorky. And my cringingly dorky bar is set high.

I mean, the emphasis is on the "ee", I shit you not. And it's drawn out.

Speaking of being drawn out, it's a pleasingly drawn-out Spring we're having in Michigan this year, I'm happy to note. Quite the fine interlude. But I did see my first mosquito last night, while watering Part I of where I'm aiming to supplement the ecosystem with a little more grass in the mix. Yep, the times, as usual, along with the seasons, are a-changin'.

I've had one loss to deal with recently that I tell myself is probably really more of a sense of loss than it is a loss, if one (whichever it is) more acutely sunk in of late. I alternate between thinking I'm telling myself that (a) to try to diminish the legitimacy of my emotions there & maybe shame myself into less intense feeling (yeah, right), or anyway not contribute to making it any bigger than it has to be for me, or is already, or has been, and (b) because it really isn't so much of one, realistically, if I look at it in certain brass-tacks ways that I guess I can, maybe, I know I'm trying to, some of the time. A wave of real anger here and there has helped. I figure I can always figure out what I really think later, since it doesn't make any difference to anything now, and I'm not generally digging how it feels to think about it any more than I have to.

Makes for crap reading, I realize, that sort of blather without specifics. Sorry 'bout that. I doubt many of you know the song from Pippin, though, so at least I've probably not put that in your heads. ;)

They're like weather, said kind counselor, way back when. Emotions. They're like weather. And that's a veritable portal to meditation, that one.