Reasons I am happy right now
Jun. 14th, 2008 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaDaniel and I are getting married in two weeks and two days!
Our wedding rings are ready to be picked up! In full crunchy*-hippy Berkeley-denizen character, we ordered them from a recycled-gold jeweler. The idea behind this is that precious metals can be reclaimed from all sorts of sources--many of them discarded electronic devices--so we can get rings that are fashioned from melted-down cell phone circuitry, instead of mined out of dynamited mountain-tops and extracted from the exposed ore by cyanide.
We have found a new apartment! It is in a single-story house, which will be seismically retrofitted this year, with a good-quality foundation. Short of a steel box bolted to bedrock in the middle of Wyoming, this is about as safe as we are going to get for earthquake-preparation while living on the Hayward fault. The apartment is also a large one-bedroom, with hardwood floors, a new gas stove and refrigerator, in a lovely neighborhood, very close to BART, biking distance to campus and nice grocery stores, around the block from a friend, and it has a yard! A real yard! Not, I hasten to add, the kind of real yard that allows you to play baseball, but the real kind of yard that allows you to grow all those lovely gardens full of succulents that Berkeley does so well. It is the front yard, so everyone on the street will be able to see it, and the landlords specified that it will be entirely ours. They have not planted anything yet (it's full of dead grass), because what with the drought in California and everything, they didn't want to grow anything that requires too much water. But they told us that it is all ours, and seemed very supportive of our plans to plant many varieties of succulents.
Daniel is done with school! He still has to finish up clearing his teaching credential, which will take until Wednesday next week, but after that I will have him all to myself, and I won't need to share with anyone. After his last day yesterday, we went together to a party at the house of one of his colleagues, and there were many kinds of desserts. One in particular was like a lemon tart, only better, and I had two slices. I finally figured out that it was key lime pie, so I bookmarked the page in our copy of The Joy of Cooking and I plan to try making it whenever I can find key limes.
I went to the farmer's market today, and the most amazing kind of pluot is back in season! It has dappled green skin and red flesh, and it is absolutely fabulous. I googled around a bit, but couldn't find the name of the variety, but if you see a greenish pluot, available right about now, that's probably it**.
Does anyone else have any reasons to be happy right now? I feel that my happiness is too big to be explained only by this list, so I'm probably experiencing someone else's spillover.
Here's a kitten:
His name is Tarragon. He's one of the kittens at Hopalong, where I volunteer.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
suddenleap, are you still looking for a kitten?
*And I am unashamed. Granola is delicious!
**My googling did reveal, however the difference between pluots, plumcots, and apriums. It has to do with the proportion of plum to apricot: plumcots are half plum and half apricot. Pluots are half plumcot and half plum, or 1/4 apricot and 3/4 plum. Apriums are half plumcot and half apricot, or 1/4 plum and 3/4 apricot.
Our wedding rings are ready to be picked up! In full crunchy*-hippy Berkeley-denizen character, we ordered them from a recycled-gold jeweler. The idea behind this is that precious metals can be reclaimed from all sorts of sources--many of them discarded electronic devices--so we can get rings that are fashioned from melted-down cell phone circuitry, instead of mined out of dynamited mountain-tops and extracted from the exposed ore by cyanide.
We have found a new apartment! It is in a single-story house, which will be seismically retrofitted this year, with a good-quality foundation. Short of a steel box bolted to bedrock in the middle of Wyoming, this is about as safe as we are going to get for earthquake-preparation while living on the Hayward fault. The apartment is also a large one-bedroom, with hardwood floors, a new gas stove and refrigerator, in a lovely neighborhood, very close to BART, biking distance to campus and nice grocery stores, around the block from a friend, and it has a yard! A real yard! Not, I hasten to add, the kind of real yard that allows you to play baseball, but the real kind of yard that allows you to grow all those lovely gardens full of succulents that Berkeley does so well. It is the front yard, so everyone on the street will be able to see it, and the landlords specified that it will be entirely ours. They have not planted anything yet (it's full of dead grass), because what with the drought in California and everything, they didn't want to grow anything that requires too much water. But they told us that it is all ours, and seemed very supportive of our plans to plant many varieties of succulents.
Daniel is done with school! He still has to finish up clearing his teaching credential, which will take until Wednesday next week, but after that I will have him all to myself, and I won't need to share with anyone. After his last day yesterday, we went together to a party at the house of one of his colleagues, and there were many kinds of desserts. One in particular was like a lemon tart, only better, and I had two slices. I finally figured out that it was key lime pie, so I bookmarked the page in our copy of The Joy of Cooking and I plan to try making it whenever I can find key limes.
I went to the farmer's market today, and the most amazing kind of pluot is back in season! It has dappled green skin and red flesh, and it is absolutely fabulous. I googled around a bit, but couldn't find the name of the variety, but if you see a greenish pluot, available right about now, that's probably it**.
Does anyone else have any reasons to be happy right now? I feel that my happiness is too big to be explained only by this list, so I'm probably experiencing someone else's spillover.
Here's a kitten:
His name is Tarragon. He's one of the kittens at Hopalong, where I volunteer.
suddenleap, are you still looking for a kitten?*And I am unashamed. Granola is delicious!
**My googling did reveal, however the difference between pluots, plumcots, and apriums. It has to do with the proportion of plum to apricot: plumcots are half plum and half apricot. Pluots are half plumcot and half plum, or 1/4 apricot and 3/4 plum. Apriums are half plumcot and half apricot, or 1/4 plum and 3/4 apricot.