Greenhouse Effect

Sixty-nine little vegetable plants in pots under plastic bins take up our whole dining room table. But they're my babies, started from seeds. Where else can they go? Soon the air will be warm enough to place them outside on the deck, and in a week or so, the soil will be warm enough to transplant them into the garden, but for now? It's breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the living room so that later, in July, August, and September our table will be laden with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash of many varieties, and perhaps even...

a pumpkin.

Oh Didi

Moving to Saudi Arabia when I was 13, my brother 11, and my sister 9, could have been one hell of a culture shock, except that it wasn't. Who knows why we were able to roll with what, to us, were the oddities of not just one, but several strange new cultures.

The oil booming Saudi Arabia of the late 70s was a crossroads of opportunity. Our dad was a white collar airline professional, and there were a few other Americans like him, but many of our fellow US citizens were oil hands and rough necks from Texas and Oklahoma. In addition, there were business men from all over Europe, and then there were the men from Pakistan, Yemen, Korea, and the Philippines who did much of the unskilled labor-- building roads, waiting tables, cleaning houses, driving taxis.

We went to an International School and so naturally our classmates reflected the same diversity. To say that it was different from our neighborhood school in the suburbs of South Jersey would be a truism, but the difference didn't seem any worse to me than moving anywhere far away from my friends. So what if some of the people spoke with funny accents?

To be honest? We used to mimic the ones that sounded funniest to us-- everyone from the Pakistani guard at the gate to the little girl from Kansas City was fair game for us. So it shouldn't have come as any surprise to me when one day my brother and sister starting chanting "Ohhhhh Didi!"  at me in a sing-songy exaggeration of an Indian accent. Still, I didn't know what they meant, and after a while it became a little maddening. With tears in my eyes, I begged them to stop.

They did, but they also laughed when they explained that "Didi" was an Indian term of respect for an older sister or cousin that they had learned from a girl at school. It's a "compliment" that they still pay me every now and then to this day, mostly because of my memorable over-reaction. Still, I giggled a little when I read what one of my students posted for her slice of life challenge today:

In India we call our big cousins didi and bhaiya. Didi is for girl and bhaiya is for boy. We say this to give respect to elders.

That's right, I thought, and posted it directly to my sister's Fb time line. She liked it, but it was my cousin Elaine who closed the loop:

Hello this is didi she wrote.

CGI Candy

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that there were many whole rooms of mysteries contained within the walls of our house. I always wished that I could find the way in to explore those magical places. Of course, as I grew older, I understood the spatial reality that made such a fantasy impossible.

Not so the producers of Captain America: Winter Soldier. We saw the inaugural movie of the Summer of '14 today, and it did not disappoint. In addition to an excellent part for Scarlet Johansson's Black Widow, there were all sorts of secrets from the past and present revealed. Plus, Chris Evans? Cobie Smulders? Anthony Mackie? And even Robert Redford? Pretty easy on the eyes.

I confess, though, that my favorite character was probably S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters, the Triskellion.

Most of the movie took place in Washington, D.C. and a lot of it was in that fictional building located, by the looks of it, between Rosslyn and Arlington Cemetery, maybe right on top of Roosevelt Island. At least 21 stories tall with its own private bridge into the district, I couldn't take my eyes off of that imaginary place, even before they revealed an hangar big enough to house three helicarriers and all their fighter planes under the Potomac.

Now that's a secret hiding place.

Still Half Full

Q: What do you call a rainy day during your vacation?

A: Vacation!

Also, a chance to pot all those seedlings I started and to run errands in a nearly deserted Target. Sure, the HVAC news was bad, and I do believe that is sleet I hear tapping against the window panes, but friends? The alarm is not set for tomorrow.

I'll take it.

Half Full

Believe it or not, we turned the a/c on this evening just to cool the place down. Even though it's only mid-April, it was in the 80s again today, a little muggy, and Sonic and Isabel were offering just that amount of doggy goodness smell that we thought a blast of cool, dry air might make the place a tad more pleasant.

That's what we hoped, anyway, but the gods of the HVAC must have seen it differently, and our heat pump did not comply with our command. Two hours later it was much warmer and much doggier inside than out.

The upside? It's going to be nearly freezing tomorrow night, with temperate temps for the rest of the week, AND we're off for spring break, so lining up a repair will be neither urgent nor inconvenient.

I'll take it.

MIA

Um... isn't there usually a season between winter and summer? 

Anyone?

My Own Private Cherry Blossoms

We met some out of town friends downtown today, and coincidentally, their visit coincided with the Cherry Blossom Festival.

In general, I am a person who avoids crowds; I think it was the 90 minute wait to get into the metro station after the July 4th fireworks (20 some years ago) that really sealed the deal, even more so than the packed subway trains we were waiting for. But today, our objective was to see our friends, and they happened to be in a verrrrry popular place.

I can honestly say that I've never seen it so crowded downtown-- there were five lanes of people streaming in both directions everywhere you went, so everywhere you went was packed. It was a beautiful day though, high 70s and blue skies. The cherry blossoms were nothing short of perfect, too-- trees full of pink blossoms with just a scattering of confetti blossoms swirling in the light breeze. And, as impossible as it seems, everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

Everyone also seemed to have a camera of some kind, all of us trying to document the beauty we were witnessing. We all had something else in common, too. None of us wanted any of those strangers in our pictures.