life is rich, life is full; it's mowing season, and clear cool blue-sky days make the grass grow so fast, you 'bout have to start over once you get to the end. it goes to seed and then grass starts growing everywhere including driveways and on people's bald heads. poison oak and every other imaginable weed starts popping up out of bushes and any other place they can take hold including the foot-wells of the car where old sodas compete with moldy swimsuits and make nutrient-rich growing environments with greenhouse capability when one parks. got to the pool and it was closed the other day so by nightfall tonight i absolutely had to go for a walk and walked the two-and-a-half miles back into the office as i often do, to make a movie or sit a minute before coming back; lately though my key hasn't worked and i can't get in the outside door. this i take as a sign since i have no legitimate business there anyway; i don't do my homework, or clean the humongous piles of crap in every corner of the place. the walk there and home are both rich and full; it's spring; people are out; people are graduating; people are getting ready to move along. this is certainly true of my sons; one is graduating out in Kansas soon; another here at the high school; one is graduating second grade, and the last is actually graduating pre-school. i myself am doing the opposite of graduating, which is staying in a classroom after all these silly years. nevertheless a rich full life is treating me well; i have a very well-documented granddaughter, diva, media idol, not camera shy in the least, and i'll spend part of the month meeting her, as well as attending graduations.

got away for a weekend, to pere marquette park, up by alton, a traditional place where my ancestors once settled many years back. coming up through the city we got lost and actually crossed the mississippi, but it was raining hard coming past the cliffs where the cliffs appeared to be pushing us into the swollen river like a squeegie. kept hearing people say "you'se" up there which provoked my curiosity; i thought that was only in the bronx or maybe philly, but apparently it's rural alton too; three different people i heard say it, more than once. came home and finished the quilt, so i'm putting it on the media circuit and getting opinions about it before i finish it. my movie, you'll see in a minute; it's little more than a cute slide show with a good classic tune. i've gotten too busy for an i-movie i don't understand; too busy to follow the indians; too busy to watch the weather skirt across the midwest and miss us, barely, again. it's tick season. i'm not too busy to pull those little suckers off if they start heading for the promised land. the weather is stunning; it rains a lot, then, when the sun comes out, it's crystal clear and beautiful. all living beings are out in force. we have to ramp up the pressure to survive.

took the quilt into work, because that's where the good videocam is; i figured i could at least show it to my mom, which i did. don't really know where such an enormous project came from, what got into me, where i happened to pull forth what it needed, to get it all together. it's kind of an odd structure, altogether, many-colored, black and gold on its edges, bow-tie in pattern. i'll tell you all about it soon, soon as it's done. i'm actually getting some advice on it, now that i have it out in public. but i've never really followed much advice on it. i just made it; i didn't do much to learn about the process. i could do better, if i would listen to people who had a clue. but life is too busy; the little guy likes to go out, play baseball; the middle son is reading through harry potter books (flying, really) while the older two are taking huge breaths to finish marathon stints in schools; little do they know, that life can get a little goal-less, when there's no graduation in sight, and one day turns with stunning regularity into the next. out of school, that's great, as long as there's a plan, there's a way to pull in a decent life. it's their problem; i'm beginning to let go, and have to have faith once in a while in spite of myself. all the creatures- the spiders, the poison oak, the snake that molted outside the hotel pool, the possums that are out because of the wet: they all just want a share of it. let the hot stuff begin...