breakingsod.com

My friend Azra asked a rockin’ question on her lovely blog Dreaming of Chiaroscuro.

If you prayed for God, instead of to God, what would you pray for?

Go see my answer and add your own two cents.

Don’t miss her nefarious tomatoes, while you’re at it.

At least, according to one of my clients yesterday.

As I worked on her body, I noticed her jaw clenching and unclenching, so I saved the last fifteen minutes of the massage for some extra luscious neck attention, cranio sacral extension and lots of juicy mooshing(yes that is a highly scientific professional term) of all the TMJ attachments and muscles.. As I slid my hands almost imperceptibly out from under her head and wished her a good evening, she said four words that made my day:

‘You are the antidote’, breathed out in a long sigh of blissful relief.

Sophie says I should put it on my business cards.

I’m thinking, T-shirt.

Had a sweet, sweet weekend up in Vancouver.

Delayne was carving sand into a rollercoaster for the PNE and I got to assist him and meet the rest of the team-what a great, goofy, talented bunch! It was so fun, the sand is amazing-so fine and silty and perfect for shaping. It holds it’s form exquisitely too. Such a joy to work with and so cool to learn new techniques and use all the clever tools(other than my own two hands!).

We made a little forest on the side of the rollercoaster, which I populated with birds and a rabbit.

Unfortunately, I was too absorbed to take many pictures, but Delayne snapped some, so hopefully he will get ‘em to me(nudge, nudge) and I’ll show y’alls later.

Despite an SUV vs. train wreck that caused my bus to sit(with me in it) for TWO HOURS at the King St Station before departing, much drenching rain and a certain lack of privacy(ahem), it was a succulent and rejuvenating trip and I daydreamed of sandy goodness, of smooth jazz and salty, sun-bronzed muscles, of the superfox waitress serving us luscious mussels in her tiny, slinky, sequined, suspendered minidress while we kissed and spun tales, all the long busride home.

Man, oh man, I needed that.

Life is gooooooood.

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Sam’s dry erase board spoof on our recent misadventures in beaurocratic hell at the passport office.

My freezer is now full of plump, delicious blueberries.

Rita and I picked ‘em out at Blueberry Blossom farm in Snohomish. Yum.

I also took her nettling for the first time yesterday out in Discovery park, with my other new foraging convert, Rachael.

The secondary growth is not as lush as the spring pick was so we didn’t overpick the colonies, but we all harvested enough to have a few good yummy nettle meals. Rita and I celebrated later that evening, with sauteed nettles and shallots as a side for sweet potato bisque and smoked gouda grilled cheese sandwiches. Mmmmmm…

Berrying pics.

They’ve made a movie from a short story in ‘After the Quake’, my favorite collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami! Wooooooohoooooooooo!!!

All God’s Children Can Dance.

Damn, I hope it comes to Seattle.

Link via Goodreads-my new favorite online timesuck.

Woot! Another one! I guess I’m just not up on the movie scene. Murakami’s Tony Takitani has also been moviefied.

The thought manifests as the word;
the word manifests as the deed;
the deed develops into habit;
and the habit into character.

So, watch the thought and it’s ways with care
and let it spring from love
born out of concern for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body,
as we think, so we become.

The Buddha, from the Dhammapada.

..please send a rescue mission into the dark, clammy bowels of the garage to excavate whatever’s left of my grisly remains from the rapacious maw of the gigantic junkmonster.

Sigh. Where’s Don Quixote when I need him? He’d soon send the looming piles of files, masks, paint, massage cushions, wings, sketchbooks, carpet remnants and other detritus skittering back to the hell from whence they oozed!

Accumulation is surely the eighth deadly sin.

:}

My Bad Fairy Dreads were fun an’ all,

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but it’s high summer and they were hot as hell, heavy and itchy. They had to come off! Luckily, I know some excellent debraiders. :} Soon, Rita and Sam had me lopped down to size:

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Then the great unbraiding began and with Ben’s nimble fingers coming to our rescue at the last moment, when Rita and I were reeling in a hairy delerium, my poor tortured frizzy head of doom emerged at last.

(click to expand teh frizzy head of doom)

OMFG it felt heavenly to scratch my scalp! And wash my hair. Phewph. I love having crazy long wild wanton she devil extensions, but there’s a reason I only do shit like this once a year.

My poor traumatized hair. I decided it was time for a mercy killing.

(click to maximize my cute bobness)

Ah, the short summer bob.

It’s a berriful world out there right now and I’ve been taking full advantage of it.

My friend Seb teaches classes on the wild things out there. What’s edible, what’s medicinal, what’s tasty and what’s bleeeah. Rita, Ben, Kevin and I trailed her across Tiger Mountain last saturday and learned all sorts of secrets and treasures.

We feasted on a multitude of delicious(and a few not so delicious) offerings. Huckleberries, blackberries, thimbleberries, blackcaps, lichen(imagine dry, sweaty paper), licorice fern, cat-tail root(sort of potatoey), wild plum leaves and other strange forest delicacies.

I especially loved the blackcaps-deep maroon/black raspberries-and the thimbleberries, which were surprisingly plentiful and quite tasty.

Kevin discovered a sleeping snake(you can see it on flickr with the rest of the picture parade) and we worked up quite a thirst with all that tromping about in the hot sun, so we hit the Snoqualmie Brew Pub for lunch and pitchers of rootbeer.

The rootbeer is excellent, which is fortunate, since we ended up consuming way more of it than we’d intended as the waiter’d forgotten to put in our order and thus we sat for several hours in sun-dazed conversation until we finally mentioned that we were starving and he, mortified, confessed his error and gave us a free extra pitcher.

All in all though, it were a grand day and we floated out of there on a haze of rootbeer bubbles, with heads full of foraging knowhow.