Good to be home

Houston was great and Canada was AWESOME, but there's really no place like home.  I've been in a daze of happiness for the last week+, remembering why I love this little house so much.  Walking to the farmer's market on Sunday mornings, the beautiful light coming through our big old-fashioned windows, cooking in my own kitchen (there's some kind of magic about that, because this kitchen is definitely smaller than the Houston apartment one - but I almost never cooked in Houston and definitely never enjoyed it like I do here).  And having our own little backyard, which is what this post is mostly about.

But first, obligatory Canada beauty shot:

This photo is even more awesome because it was taken within a stone's throw (if thrown by someone with a better arm than mine) of the Burgess Shale quarry.  Trilobites!

Anyway, after a week in that part of the world, you'd think it would be a let-down to get back to the semi-suburbia that is Menlo Park, but that was definitely not the case.  First of all, I didn't get to go straight back home - Sam and I flew back to Houston in an all-day airport marathon, involving three layovers and a lot of overpriced food, to pick up my car and all my stuff from the summer.  We drove home via Tucson and spent two glorious days eating at places that would have cost twice as much in California, and caught up with the surprisingly many people we know who've been drawn down there in the last few years.  That was followed by some pretty but never-ending driving, a little sight-seeing and arm-waving in Sam's field area, and FINALLY arriving home just in time to get some take-out from our favorite Chinese place down the street.

(Also, I have to include this, we watched Hunger Games that night, and I really don't get why people were so happy about it.  I really think that's one of the worst movies I've seen in a while, both from a fan's perspective and a regular movie-goer's perspective.  Moving on...)

So it turns out that Good Mood + Free Time = Ambitious Projects, and that's where the backyard comes in.  We had the great luck of moving into a place that had been reasonably well tended by a woman who (apparently) really loves plants, so from day one in this house we had a green and blooming backyard.  Amazingly, we've managed not to kill everything in our first year, despite a few long absences during the dry season, and now that we're signed on for year two, it's been exciting to think about how we can improve the yard ourselves and really make it into a place we love.  I think of this as the equivalent to the new paint job when we first moved in, but this time it involves living things and long-term commitment to keeping those things alive.

Last year for Sam's birthday, I got him some seeds and a gift card to a really neat nursery near our house.  He built a pretty kickass raised garden from some scrap wood in the garage, and we tried to grow things like cilantro, onions, and lettuce.  The only thing that really took off was the parsley, so much so that it's now attempting to reproduce.  I'm fairly certain some of the blame for our failure lies on critters eating the new shoots, because the little bit of cilantro that did appear had its tasty bits chewed off within a day or two.  At any rate, the garden is pretty bare now, but we revisited the nursery and we're ready for a fresh start.

That mass of green on the left is the overgrown parsley.

While we were at the nursery, we also decided to just go ahead and try all the little improvements Sam has been talking about - native plants to fill in some of the bare patches in the yard, and installing a drip system so everything won't die next time we travel.

Sam's really good at doing useful things, and I'm really good a spending money.  So in addition to all that, we tried this pallet garden project that we had each heard about independently, inspired by our finding a pretty good-looking, small pallet next to a dumpster last week (it was fate!).  The tutorial we tried to follow is here, but we didn't really follow it all that closely.  Our step-by-step:

1) Steal (?) a pallet that looks like it's about to be thrown out.
2) Sand down the rough edges so it doesn't impale you with splinters.
3) Cover all the stains and imperfections with leftover house paint.
4) Buy the cheapest flowers at the nursery and herbs that might or might not ever be useful.
5) Staple-gun landscaping fabric to the back of the pallet.
6) Throw in some crappy compost and a bag of potting soil.
7) Plant all the flowers and herbs.
8) Realize there's nowhere near enough. Buy more at Trader Joe's and piss off a lady by clearing the shelf of all the cute little orange ones.
9) Plant the new ones, realize it's still not enough. Transplant some of the overgrown parsley.
10) Prop the finished pallet against the wall and hope for the best!

So far, it's looking surprisingly healthy, with the exception of the transplanted parsley and the Trader Joe's chives.  It's definitely suffering from gravity a bit, and I'm not sure we'll ever be able to hang it on the wall (the original plan) because the back is bulging with the weight of all that potting soil and vegetable matter.  But I'm pleased because it looks cute and homemade, and considering that everything didn't just up and die the first night, I'm feeling a little more optimistic than maybe I should be.

The plan was to hang it here (nails already conveniently in place). No, we're not competing with the neighbors' pepper and tomato plants, where did you get that idea?

See how pretty??  It was really the perfect plan.

All planted up and ready to go! You're supposed to let it lie there for a few weeks so the soil can settle and the roots can get going, but it seemed like that would just kill off everything at the top. Also we didn't have nearly enough plants, or soil, so the top was kind of falling apart and we wanted to get gravity involved.

The herbs are all in the green row, and the purplish blue ones at the bottom are supposed to attract butterflies. The sad, sad parsley is at the top with the Trader Joe's additions.

So it's currently propped against the wall, and it might just have to stay there.  Still pretty cute though, you have to admit.

I should mention that all this went down while we were taking care of a friend's cat, which was displaced when a bank robber set fire to his getaway car in her carport while she was out of the country (best reason to babysit a cat EVER).  The kitty was quite happy to perch on the couch watching hummingbirds, and us.

Awww.

So dignified.  As though her head wasn't smashed between the window pane and screen just seconds before.

We're quite sad to have given her back, since it was nice to have a furry thing around the house for a while, but I'm sure she's much happier at home with her scratching post, and Sam's allergies are certainly better off this way.

Update from Humidtown

Huh, I guess I'm not so good at this blogging thing.  As always, a lot has happened since the last time I even thought about updating, but it would be pretty futile to recap all that.  Instead, here's what's happening now.

Houston
I'm in Houston.

It's pretty hot, and really humid, but I haven't turned into a puddle or sweated away all my clothes or anything.  I do think my muscles have atrophied because, as it turns out, exercising in 80 degree heat with 80% humidity isn't enjoyable, and I don't have a good track record of consistently doing things that aren't enjoyable.

In the months leading up to this little adventure, I got all sorts of happy advice from people who had come before me.  The climate was always the first subject, but that might be because I always asked about it.  "How did you stand it?  Why do people choose to live there?  What the hell does 90% humidity even mean?  Is back sweat just a standard fashion accessory?"  Most people were cautiously optimistic, and clearly they had all survived.  No one answered my question about the back sweat.

The other common tip was about the driving.  I heard independently from two people that the drivers here are hyper-aggressive, and when I brought this up to others, no one really shot it down.  So I developed this picture in my head of crazy lifted monster trucks looming in my rear-view mirror for a few terrifying seconds before whipping around me at high speed, their truck-nuts dangling in a show of Texan masculinity.

Well, as it turns out, the drivers aren't that bad, either.  Compared to my previous internship experience, which kicked off with a car crash that totaled two vehicles and left me hyperventilating for half a day (and ultimately resulted in my current car insurance premium of $120/month for fuck-all coverage), traveling in Humidtown has been a carousel ride, complete with pretty ponies and giraffes.  And I have yet to see a single truck-nut, so I guess those are more of a California brand douchebaggery.

I will say, though, that the warnings I received about Houston suburbia were right on the mark.  I was told to live in Montrose, or the Heights, or the Museum District, or really anywhere in the Inner Loop, and that distance from downtown meant distance from everything enjoyable about this city.  I tried to heed those warnings, but due to an irreparable warp in the fabric of space and time, housing here is very nearly as expensive as housing in Menlo Park.  For that and various other reasons, I ended up in a furnished apartment in a gated complex, in the middle of a stuccoed shopping center, at the edge of the Outer Loop, in Chinatown.  Positives: proximity to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Malaysian restaurants.  Negatives: pretty much everything else.

Well, that might be a little harsh, but it is a bit weird that my closest supermarkets have chicken feet and pig heads but no milk or bread.  And really, more than anything else, I've realized that this neighborhood really just lacks beauty.  Houston, as you may know, is flat flat flat.  When you get on a freeway overpass, you are as high as you can get without taking an elevator.  I'm sure it's not a big deal for people who grew up in topographically challenged areas, but I'm having a hard time adjusting to the fact that the only features I will ever see on the skyline here are buildings.  And a little exploring has led me to realize that some areas of Houston strive to alter this view: there are neighborhoods with cute brick houses and big, leafy shade trees, and they're actually pleasant to spend time in, even just driving through.  But here in my frontage road community, we have concrete, power lines, the tollway, and a really big bank to fill our view, and if you don't find that a little bit depressing, you're probably not imagining it properly.

So I've been venturing out more and more, and despite all I've just said, my experience here has been overall very positive.  I've experienced some of the coolest thunderstorms of my life, eaten some pretty delicious food, scienced some awesome science, and a few times it's been cool enough post-rain that I've stepped outside and felt happy about it.  And more than anything, the great people here are making it all so much fun that I'm actually a little bummed that I've passed the halfway point of my stay.

Oh yeah, and I saw an alligator.

Weddings
A lot of my friends are getting married these days.  I guess it's just that time of life, but wow it's weird.  Of course it's super exciting and awesome, and I love seeing my friends all happy and lovey, but that is so far from my life plans right now, so it can't help feeling a bit weird.  Also, it's a universal truth we've known from age six that first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage (I should get an award for awesome blog writing after that one).  I can blissfully ignore the fact that more and more people in my life are referring to husbands and wives instead of boyfriends and girlfriends, but babies are a little more solid and in-your-face.  There are actually a lot of babies in my life right now too, but they're the progeny of people in their 30s, so that's okay.  My high school and college friends will always be too young and doofy (love you guys) to have babies, at least in my mind.  Plus I'm really bad at remembering birthdays, so when the people in my life start multiplying without my having any say in it, the birthday-remembering part of my brain will probably just over-pressurize and burst.  At least then I'll have an excuse.



Travel
I guess Houston sort of falls into this category, but who said blogs have to be logical and organized.  Looking back on the last year or two, and looking ahead to the coming years, I have a fuckload of traveling going on.  I know it doesn't hold a candle to the endless adventures of those backpacking types and globetrotters who make my Facebook feed look mildly interesting, but for me, it's pretty good.  Yesterday was the two-year mark from my trip to France with Sam, which was followed by a jaunty road trip around the western U.S. looking at grad schools.  Stanford obligingly shipped me off to New Zealand within months of my arriving, but not before a quick trip to Death Valley, which will always feel like an exotic land no matter how many central Californian gas stations you drive through to get there.  Now I'm in Houston, which is pretty damn foreign to me, and the minute this internship is over I'm headed to Canada for a little geologizing in the Rockies with some of the best people I know.  A few months later it's back to Zealandia, but hopefully not before a little California travel with the absolute best person I know, if we can get our act together in time.

It's sort of a crazy ride, especially for a homebody like me, but I feel so unbelievably lucky to have had these experiences.  And I think I'm getting a little better at traveling without freaking out, but my New Zealand partner in crime can attest that I'm not there yet.  Practice makes perfect, eh?

Rennes probably deserves its own blog post, but until then here's the Frenchest photo I have from that trip.

Pretty much sums up most road trips.  This one had spectacular rocks though.

Day one in Death Valley I discovered my camera was out of batteries, and I didn't have the charger.  So this one is credit to Glenn, who pretty much always has a camera I think :)

Yeah, New Zealand was pretty nice I guess.