I am looking for a new beginning -
yours—and mine—and ours -
in the midst of this mud.
Sky: still raining, as it has for hours.

We are waiting for spring,
for light, a signal to grow.

It lies, massing, under these bricks,
and compost, and newly-nodding shoots
I planted just yesterday:
sharply pruned. Just sticks—and roots.

We are waiting for spring,
for light, a signal to grow.

Stand porchside, dry. Lean out. Bare toes
shiver-wiggling against damp concrete,
hair spattering with runoff
as it flows from roof to street.

We are waiting for spring,

Please note—my birthday is not coming up anytime soon, so please don't interpret this as a blatant "hey my birthday is next week and you'd better get me stuff "post.

Because, as we all know, I'm horrifically overprepared and wouldn't wait until the week before my birthday!

I've been tinkering around with a wish list at amazon.com for quite some time, but haven't posted a link to it yet.I added a few more things to it this morning and figured what the heck, I'll look crass and commercial and post the damn thing.

Makes me feel icky doing this. Ask my parents—I get squirmy when asked what I want/need for my birthday or Christmas. Because, quite frankly, I take care of my needs, and most of my wants are so incredibly arcane that nobody would ever guess them.

It always comes down to this.

The thoughts, they always come, in pulses and gasps and stuttering flows of intuition all at the wrong times. The attempts, futile, to pull it together, to make sense of the images and flashes of thought that come at me when I'm more interested in attempting to live my life: the images that stay with me when my eyes close at the end of the day.

How I see the same things in people, over and over, as the years pass. The names change, the people change, yet these are the same eyes and the same mind still looking out and observing, the still point of onlooking that can't seem to look away.

The intellectual part of my mind registers the differences between people, knows their intrinsic differences that make them into different people, but there's still the less cognizant part of me that still comes to a shuddering standstill when confronted with inexplicable strangeness and similarity.

Usually, when I'm writing something to be posted here, I have music blaring. Not tonight. Tonight I want to hear the uneven clacking of keys as I hesitantly pound out the thoughts that have stayed with me today. Better, I think, the thoughts get put down—even at this late hour—than to take them to sleep with me.

I am a regular at the new Publix store out in Madison. I think most of the people who work there recognize me now. They greet me with smiles that seem unforced: I would like to think this is because I am cheerful—dare I even say funny?—with them. Several people have noticed that I often come in with Kat, and I think that for a moment or two, some of them presumed that she and I were a couple (judging by the surprise elicited when I mentioned she had a boyfriend and I a husband, neither of whom are ever seen at said grocery store).

Sean's parents and grandparents showed up early this afternoon to take some of my extra irises off of my hands. I gave them three bags full of irises that are ready to transplant. Most will bloom blue-on-purple or purple-on-purple, but there are a few that will bloom white-on-white.

Speaking of—one of those is blooming at the side of the house. It's absolutely beautiful; highly ruffled, almost-glowing white petals over white falls. Very nice. It's wasted over on the side of the house where no one sees it. Next year, though, it will be much more prominent.

Okay, for those of you using Netscape 4.7x to read this site, the Easter Bunny has a present for you: you can now read all pages on domesticat.net again. After weeks of pondering what I could do to make the site both HTML 4.0 compliant and have workarounds that would make the page readable in Netscape 4.7x….

I had a momentary flash of brilliance.

I'm cautiously optimistic that things are slowly returning to normal over here. The machine that hosts domesticat.net is actually located in England. (This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a British friend who once worked for an ISP.) Yesterday afternoon, meaning late yesterday evening GMT, the uplink to the machine died. It took somewhere between six and twelve hours to get everything restored.

Then, of course, shortly after the server uplink was re-established, our cable modem went nuts. Our cable provider's DHCP server elected to barf on us. Thus no net connection for most of the day.

Oh, well—there were plenty of tasks that needed doing. This year's Stanley Cup is proving to be quite entertaining; for the first time in my life, I have friends around that enjoy hockey. Tonight I did something I've not done in years—called someone up on the phone and said, "Hey! The game's on! Are you watching?"

How strange, to actually meet the person that is Jonatha Brooke. How strange, to encounter for the first time a fan's mentality—to realize that the person who is standing in front of you and laughing at a joke is someone who is called by a single name by her friends—and not the full name that's on her albums.

Tonight: absolution through quiet sadness. Tonight is one of those nights that I damn the human mind's capacity to remember, especially of things that should have been let go many years ago.

A few nights ago I had a dream about Rustina. Rustina Wear, gone these fifteen years, gone one year less than she lived—the girl who was my sister's childhood best friend. I would make expected and pithy statements about how her untimely death in a freak car accident was one that affected us deeply.

Call it a night to share a secret or two. Some things are better left not unsaid.

My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.

Okay. Attempt number three at writing a semi-coherent post. Doesn't seem to be in the cards tonight.

I've found lately that my posts are taking on more of the style of a letter to a friend; I'm starting to have trouble distinguishing between the two, and I don't quite know what to make of the change.

Just hung up the phone—tried to call Brad just now. I'm not terribly surprised he's not home; there's hockey on tonight and I really didn't expect him to be there. Strangely enough—I spent the evening with a large (for me) number of people, but at the end of the evening I found myself wanting most to curl up with the phone while talking to an old friend. Since my east coast friends are well off into dreamland, I thought I'd reach out, out west, and see what was going on there.

Too much caffeine. After bowling tonight, I probably shouldn't have downed that coffee from Barnes and Noble.