Excellent day

Congratulations day, you get an A-plus! Pictures.

Last night, as previously mentioned, was a whole lot of good times. capital_l and techolope and I rocked out at Jake Ivories. I made the midnight train home, while they stayed for further hours and walked, since the subways had closed. Of course, they walked a couple of miles. I rode for an hour. My options were different.

This morning, I started off by mowing the lawn. redmed went to her Saturday morning pilates class. She got back, and I promptly decided to cancel my planned trip to the rock climbing gym and hang out with her instead. We went to the Home Despot and saw these excellent, healthy looking plants. Astilbe, Lillies, and Dahlias. Got a bunch of plants, as well as “Sevin” dust to kill whatever is eating my cabbages, plus thistle for the birds to eat, and came home.

Planted the plants in the Easternmost bed, which is now looking quite rockin’. While over there, I heard cheeping, looked up, and saw little baby bird heads sticking out of the birdhouse. How cute. Mom came back to feed them, and we snapped pictures.

Then I busted out the power-washer and attacked both the fence and the deck. In Riverside, things eventually moulder and mildew at a great rate. Powerwashing knocks the mildew back, but in this case it also knocked a lot of the paint clean off the fence. Lovely. More priming. More painting.

The current conversation about the deck is a choice between washing, scraping, priming, and painting (major pain in the butt), or buying new material (the recycled plastic boards and handrails) and replacing it ($1500 AND a major pain in the butt). We’ll see.

While playing around with that, the Oriole graced us with his presence. What an excellent bird. Incredible, bright orange feathers. He jumped around in the sprinkler, hid in the peas, scooted through the peppers, and otherwise made himself known.

We went over to the framing store, and got redmed‘s painting from Jamaica framed. It’ll look good. Then we went to Whole Foods and spoiled ourselves. God, I love Whole Foods.

Dinner was a recipe that I had in Beijing, but only just found out how to make: “Smoked tea fish.” Take a fleshy white fish, cut it into 1″ cubes, and wrap the cubes in tinfoil. Fill your wok about 2″ deep with mixed rice and barley (uncooked). spread about 1 tbsp of green tea on top of the rice, put the foil wrapped fish on top of the rice, put the lid on the wok, and set it to “med/low.” After half an hour, open the foil. After another half hour, it’s done. Rock. It’s quite tasty. Also had scallops and, naturally salad. We’re drowning in salad from the Scratch Farm. Half a bushel of salad per week. I love it.

After dinner, I went into Providence, where there was waterfire, fireworks, and my parkour buddy Dustin. We did some “crowd running,” which basically amounts to making ones way across a crowded urban environment, as rapidly as possible, without ramming into, tipping over, or otherwise bothering anyone. Zoom.

And now, I sleep, in preparation for the demolition derby tomorrow.

Honk-shu.