Restoring and ReSTORYing the Landscape

•January 24, 2008 • 7 Comments

Spinning my wheels all morning.
Happens when unable to do a head-clearing ride (weather pretty rotten oot).
I’d love to dive into a good novel, but I’m supposed to be writing, not relaxing. I wander over to the computer after breakfast, depressed by our daily snoozepaper, pull in the wooden chair and click the mouse… look up and it’s four in the afternoon.

Oh, you’ve heard that one?
The BBC, and other news outlets seem more believable…our paper is both depressing and lamely comical (we call it the SF Comical).
And this is in the most progressive, organic “market” in the USA! We’re lucky, we have more than a few nervous, creative visionaries trying to break through the crust of convenience with such tools as MoveOn.org and the Tides Foundation.
A sodden thought that bears repeating, since it seems as true now as when it was first uttered: repetition works wonders.
News Stories vs. New Stories
Car culture vs. Bicycle culture
One brilliant column in the Scotsman crystallizes all kinds of thoughts that have swirled around my head, but unherded and unheeded carry no impact. Might as well direct you to the great Lesley Riddoch herself.
A real writer, and apparently a hell of a cyclist as well.
My blind spots vs. my strengths.
Right now, I’m trying not to beat myself up about not IMMMEDIATELY finishing my BOOK, my first EASY book, because this damn blog is so immediately gratifying, distracting, all-consuming.
You care, huh?
Then send me a note, do. We bike commuter weirdos gotta stick together more than ever, so we are ready ready ready when we’re needed to be ‘roll models’.
It is going to happen.
Maybe we can be influence-pedalers: currently, despite the haze of green-intention, my bike industry went wildly astray!

The “ultralight” trend.
The “length of fork travel” trend.
The “more gears is better” trend.
By refusing to produce strong, fixable and long-lasting parts manufacturers do a disservice to those without money who need the bike the most, while loading up the landfill with cheap disposabikes and throwaway componentry.
One aspect of the bike industry that is 95% pure sham is the “women specific” trend.
If the company isn’t contacting me or other women’s bike clubs, they aren’t really looking for input from large numbers of ordinary women who ride (as opposed to race)

“Women’s” bikes are created for ease of manufacture, not for safety/ease of women who ride…usually they have way too high a bottom bracket, and the rider assumes it’s because she’s just not very coordinated that she feels so vulnerable perched up high…Augggghhh.

Newspapers and TV harp on the stock market, and broadcast fear…I’m tired of it.

I am convinced it’s going to be positive, the way our drought here in Marin stopped housing developments for a solid 20 years…(too bad that there is a boom on now). Result: more open space to save for perpetuity, thanks to a political decision to curb growths via water hookups. Maybe it could happen again! I would stop complaining about MMWD if they did, but they have flipped flopped into major developers…

I am convinced that in an economic depression the citizenry, sorry, the consumers, will figure out ways to get by (get+buy) withOUT money. We can adapt, yes, even the rich can learn to be flexible.

There are already folks living simply on purpose.
MAYBE because it’s fun.
Maybe because it’s right.

Rapid growth in any system is a disaster.

All my reader/riders, will be the consultants for getting around sans gazol.

And yes, there will be some wailing and gnashing from the Corporations.
Without Madison Avenue’s loudspeaker the complaining won’t reach very far.

Shopping might turn to swapping. I still hear stories from people born before cars, who remember that landscape.
Last night P. J. O’Rourke, a hilarious (but conservative!!) writer appeared on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and boiled the “Market” down to a Thing that vascillates between Greed and Fear.
Well, what if you refuse to be scared?
Examine the greed?
Isn’t it possible that less ‘money’ would force us to struggle to solve the bigger problems, undistracted?
About car vs. bike culture: I intend to live longer thanks to riding despite living in the USA where 3x as many cyclists are killed per 100,000 people as are killed in Holland. A bitter penalty for being the minority in a car culture.

But I am quite sure NOT pedaling will kill me faster (or suffocate my joy). This irony lives in my messenger bag, next to the high-calorie lunch I shoved in because errands are going to take me four hours, and four hours away from the fridge can affect my road smileage.

The bike blogs circulate, entertain and alert thousands of people (someday millions) and aren’t beholden to adver-dollars. to be repeated until their messages can help mould a new habit among the curious as well as reinforce the ‘choir’.

Posted in cars, Cycling, food, Jacquie Phelan, Ride, The Book

Any Excuse For A Party

•January 22, 2008 • 3 Comments

Two bits of advice I never followed:

1) Friend Owen M.’s : “you cannot be a party girl and expect to get results as a bike racer” and…
2) sitting in a sauna between two women, the issue of discipline came up as we all shared our reasons for a daily swim. One asked me why I ran everywhere (i was into jogging for transportation in the late 1970’s), and if I liked it.
I answered: ” I run for fun, so yes of course l like it. You learn every inch of the city“.

San Francisco is a city worth combing carefully through, the treasures (Victorian architecture, plantings, shops and parks) are in every block.

The other woman sniffed, “you cannot expect simply to run and swim and play your whole life away”…she was an opthamologist who had trained as a lawyer before deciding on medical school.
Surprisingly, the one with the arch comment prevailed. I was still beating myself up about that childhood promise to become a doctor.
I re-entered (and again left unfinished) pre-medical studies.
Somehow I wasn’t ready to follow my (Ur-slacker’s) heart –which raced as merrily at 180 b.p.m. as at 50 beats).
As fate would have it, the next year brought such upheaval—a Hurricane Katrina of the soul—that I granted myself permission to ….run and swim and play. Forever.

There was much to celebrate in my decision (not fully conscious) to be a professional er …’athlete’. Freedom from routine and freedom from imposed makeup and yuppie clothing. Even cycling uniforms put me off, I hardly ever got with any uniform.
I’m sure it can be attributed to allergies: to work, to tidiness, to ….responsibility.
This freed up time to drag others down the same path (in very small increments).

I’m winding up to something: the first decent party I ever went to.
Tobias Baskin was the host, he was a friend of my sister Jill’s, and he had a dozen friends over to make pizzas. LOTS of pizzas. After that evening of fresh piping hot tomatoey pies and flour-coated hands and clothes I was sure this was the Correct Way To Throw A Party.
“Have a Mission”.
So before long I was having Bicycle Swap Meets (which were indeed quite the little trading parties, and I served food to the ‘guests’), Moon Viewing Picnics and Birthday Garbage Pickups. The flyers were fun to make and they fell out of a binder when I was moving my files around the mogul-field known as my storage closet /former bedroom.

There is almost no white space. The words are packed in, margin-to-margin…and of course I’m in love with my ‘copy’…I had no idea that writing would become Homework For Life.

Nowadays I’m ashamed of the hodgepodge look ( flyers even more messy than my room, my hair, my daily non-routine). But I’m not afraid to show them to you and say: you shoulda been there, finding a much-desired rare bicycle… bike part… jersey…riding buddy. You coulda pickedup half a ton of trash on my birthday “Planet Polishing Party”… or fabricating non-Hallmark Valentines, the ultimate do-it-yourself declarations of sincerity.

There remain twenty three more cutting and pasting days…

Posted in Calendar, clothes, flowers, lame wordplay

Dedicated Follower of Trashin’

•January 19, 2008 • 3 Comments

Dear Reader/Riders
It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of too many clothes, banjos, books and Cool Scraps of Paper is in want of a burglar.

Topographically, my habitat resembles a teenager’s bedroom. The kind of room you climb through, rather than walk across.
Tripping is a daily hazard, and yet…I put off the big Clean-a-thon for fear I’ll need JUST THAT THING, the day after i’ve brought it to the Salvation Army thrift shop.
I kid myself that I’m housing the Objets Trouves out of respect for the Items but in truth, it is merely that I feel sorry for them.
Since I never sort things, can’t throw them out, they remain abandoned.
Boxed up and forgotten, or left around in plain sight to inspire me to ‘do something with’ them…they continue to be L’Austin Found.
Rescued from the wind and rain, my ‘orphans’ are still un-homed, still in Purgatory.
Perhaps a nice burglar will come along and remove some of it?

There is of course a much more creative solution: re-purpose the clothes and get them out into public view (i.e. a fashion show) and MOVE THEM back onto human bodies…
(Sounds like hard work..)
Two of the things are bicycles. One a kid’s bike, one a grown up.
I KNOW: I can drag, er… trailer them down to Trips For Kids!
Squeaking of which…(year of the rat coming up, too), Marilyn’s having
Bruise, Bikes, and Bucks fundraiser Feb 10 (Sunday). At Broken Ear Drum Brewery, San Rafael.
Small world out there: the mycologist who convinced me to hospitalize myself back when I was eating poison mushroom souffle (another blog, look up…er, I forget)….she’s the mother of the pub owner, Noah…very nice person, hope to talk fungi with her in a few weeks.
But the burglars (or the detectives)…If anyone were to overturn my “Shocking Augh” room, I wouldn’t even know it.
What to do?

Posted in lame wordplay

Word Presstidigitation

•January 14, 2008 • 2 Comments

The wonders of technology are not only for those with a technical mind.
A ticklish mind is all that’s required.
The obsessive nature is optional.

Four months ago Chris Hill pushed his laptop toward me as I took in the sights of Edinburgh from his 4th (or is it 5th?) floor walk-up.

“Here, type in some of those bicycle definitions you were telling me about”.
I did it.
He typed a little more, then flipped it my way again.
“Now, can you write a bit about…anything”
Was that a request or an order? Either way, do I need to be asked twice?
Writin’ and ridin’ are damn near all I do.

Oh, right.
Eatin’ and sleepin’… so I can ride and write about more stuff.
I wrote a mini-tale about the Only Race I Do Anymore (Single Speed World Championship) and ever will do until lured to an adventure race.

Then he gave a quick tour of my shiny new blogsite to show me how it all hung together, and how easy it was to operate.

It featured…
–A mysterious black background that pulls the (inquisitive) reader in.
–This template, a couple of of swirly abstract color rectangles set into the blackness, is named “Chaotic Soul”.
I was amused, like I’d disclosed something about me by picking THAT pattern over all the other possibilities.
Damn, my soul’s not THAT chaotic, or it doesn’t seem like it from inside here, anyway.
Everything I write makes sense.
Then some more tapping came from across the table, and an image from the Edinburgh cycle tour we’d just gotten back from appeared, seen through the slots of an ancient helmet opening onto the world.
The Forth of Firth’s smooth sand.
A miniature wave riffling shoreward, where a pair of small wheeled Moulton bikes lean into each other, and a damp wombat pulls on her socks.

And then out poured “Beached”.

Since then, about a hundred (!) ‘tales’ of varying degrees of readability have been stored there….
I got a long-distance tutorial in “flickr” (still in kindergarten on that one).
But it’s all the crucial ingredients for story telling, connection-welding:
Words
Pictures
Readers

So I hunt and gather a few links, type a journal, then hit “publish”. Voila! CK you were right…

I’m in a new element.

I miss riding my bike….seems like the same synapses that were so soothed by cycling are fooled by the ‘you’ve got mail’ message!

Will report anon.

In the meantime, since that day I have: written a few local paid pieces I would NOT have found (thank YOU BIKE BIZ, ChDOT, of course) and I get to read my friend Cynthia Carbone Ward and her writin’ daughter Miranda‘s blogs (I had only HEARD of ‘blogs’ before this…and as some of you know, I had a “Glob” (reverse blog, which was mailed TO the recipient…I was a step ahead of RSS feed, I know it. After all, who has time to go HUNT for someone’s musings? They’re at WORK!
BUT…if it flops on the digital doorstep…well that’s an entirely different story…

There is always the thought that JP might have something wacquie to say about… oh, glow-ball warming?
General murders (GM)?
Something. There will always be something.
As long as it is a diversion from the day’s (word) pressing matters…

Posted in cycle racing, Cycling, Edinburgh, food, Jacquie Phelan, Moulton, Scotland, Single Speed, SSWC07, Technology, WOMBATS

The Sky By Tigerlight

•January 12, 2008 • 1 Comment

by Paige Turner

We were in the jaws of a big wet and windy storm recently, power out all around Marin…I was riding through it all, to my friend’s house so I could finish my cover story for the Specific Pun.

My editor extended the deadline, affording me an entire weekend sans electricity to “perfect” 3000 words…My working title had been: Bottom Feeder in the Rich Bottom Lands

Or would Wasteland Of The Free be better?
How about: Year of the Ratrace.?

It’s never a good sign to chew the TITLES over and over. To keep myself focused, I listed the objectives:
We Marinites waste MORE than our share despite our reputation for being faintly progressive…(proof is my living on the throw-aways)

There is a cohort of people who glean stuff from the upper crustaceans. I call my affiliates “the lower crust”. You can eat damn well out of trees, gutters (olives), and dumpsters. Even wild stuff like natives…we might be smart to learn to leach acorns, make flour, then bake bread like Miwok did.

And perhaps most important, Poverty is a half of a bogus binary division created sometime this century (see Wolfie Sachs). Time is more valuable than money Too many of us are locked in the rat race despite having ‘enough’.

In service to this story : more visits to Gary’s place at odd hours. How could I be up at three a.m.?

When there’s no television, no reading (except by candlelicht)…you go to bed at seven. At least Chas and I did. Gary and Pat do so routinely, electricity or no. Which of course means: up at three, right? Solid eight hours? So I could get PILES of typing done, then climb back to bed. First and second sleep, like the old days.

Riding around in ‘mandatory darkness’ is pretty special. Every couple blocks would be dark, and then there’d be the lit up ones (with the holiday light displays looking especially garish by comparison). And in the dark ones, only one room in each of the houses had a window with light in it. Rich, yellow candlelight usually. And in that window: people crowded around…the candle(s)!

Never saw so many people in each house before… like they are normally dispersed within (at different computer and tv terminals!).
The mood was much more quiet (obv) in the dark stripes of town. The alternating black and brightly lit streets gave the feeling of tiger coloration, maybe if you were flying overhead during those nights, you’d see a pattern of outages.

Meanwhile overlaying the dark bits, at least twice the number of stars as usual. My last trip down the lane, with rain-shiny tarmac reflecting the starlight, all fifty houses fast asleep so not even candles marring the perfect wet blackness, with a stripe of pale in front showing the way because all those stars together throw actual light, again, like they say in the old old days, you could see by that starlight, and the “Melkweg” was considered milk hurled across the sky.

It was a drag when I rode back from Gary’s that Monday at five (still nighttime) a.m. and the streetlights were on , and everything was back to ‘normal’.

Same number of sleeping souls in the neighborhood, but all those default lights blazing–the ones that stay on every night of the year…throwing away river energy, throwing away True Dark Sky, throwing away other stuff I can’t remember, too tired.

Couldn’t we agree to black out a few times a month for practice, as a voluntary nod to the inevitable transition to No Oil and Less Power per person/day?

Posted in candles, Night, transition town
Tags: ,

Get Out The Door

•January 10, 2008 • 3 Comments

Adventure is just a scone’s throw away!

It has come to our attention that a certain formerly wildish wombat is not leaving the site of her computer. Since ‘breaking down and buying’ highspeed access, there is nothing I’d rather do than…er…you all know this already.
So I’m gonna head out in the rain to see if I can pry myself away.

I believe I have enough control over my actions to do this. Otherwise…I’ll have truly broken down.
Whenever I see people pushing babies instead of letting the three year olds get some walking practice I worry that the next generation of humans won’t get outdoors for anything except to climb into some other thing with doors!

Some noisy poisonous thing. That takes them to some other place with more doors.

AUGH. I know, the mommies and daddies are trying to get somewhere a bit faster than a three year old can walk, and at least they are not in a car…but won’t the kid just get used to being carried, pushed etc?

Bicycles don’t have doors. They inspire you to believe you are the very agent of your locomotion (even though they modestly admit that they help with ‘efficiency’).

If I don’t pull away from the computer which has become a siren singing its little ‘bing’ mail-waiting song, I will become sedentary, ethereal, and blind. Who’s loooking into the neuro-optics of computer gazing (assuming more than an hour or two a day).

Til next post, pals.

Posted in cars, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan, Ride

Love & Loathing On Third Street

•January 8, 2008 • Leave a Comment

One day just before Christmas going west on Third Street, I was overtaken by a driver who leaned over to bellow through the open passenger window, “YOU SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE!” before shooting ahead of me.
San Rafael’s four lane speedway can resemble a drag race on a Friday afternoon, with the emphasis on the ‘drag’.

Behind, and to our left, the usual sea of cars arranged on a perfect grid, homebound off 101. No doubt a few unhappy campers among them,
pushing back into padded leather seats,
venting their rage
into their cell phone.
Fried from a long workday
exacerbated by sleep deprivation
owing to the mortage meltdown,
the war, or
a barking dog.
Nothing a little music
and a bag of chips can’t fix.

When my traffic partner and I were (of course) lined up again at the next red, I shifted my worry-furrowed brow into neutral. No need to show fear, and definitely no need to look her way. Eye contact is an incitement to fight in some species.
Into the crosswalk stepped a sixtyish gentleman– about ten years older than I .
He looked my way, pointed at my bicycle and exclaimed, ”We should ALL be doing that!”
I waved (from the wrist, us royals gotta protect against repetitive stress)
and thought: only in

Posted in Alice B. Toeclips, cars

Rose In Winter

•January 1, 2008 • 2 Comments

It’s most odd to find the first rose of spring three months early.

Today after a one-hour vacation away from you–dear reader/rider– I cruised slowly up Dogbark Lane and spied a couple of blooms on our neighbor’s Fortune’s Double Yellow vine.

This rose is so wild and thorny and beautiful I had to get my own…seeing someone else’s was not enough. It only has one (monthlong) flush…it doesn’t repeat the way modern tea roses do…and being an oldie, needs no care, no water (now that it’s settled) and has no buggy enemies. It was planted in our yard near the ugliest shed-ever-sold-in-a-kit, and the rose must completely cover it in order to restore the yard to a semblance of beauty. Faux barns, while easy to put in place, insult the landscape.

But what OF an early bloom?

To me, it’s as strong as a tap on the shoulder by a polar bear.

Add this sign of an off-kilter season to the crescendo of news stories on “carbon offsets” (=purchasing eco-indulgences by wealthy transgressors, the books about how to save the world, the brief appearance and predicted waning popularity of the film “The Story Of Stuff“, the fashion shows that are reputed to raise awareness about being green, the fact that someone thinks the color BLUE will be the next “green”.

GOD. What can you do?

Smell that rose, not give up.

Dig in somewhere, and don’t give into grief.

At least not for too long, less you fail to be around for the next incredible act.

Posted in Calendar, flowers, Jacquie Phelan, movies, Ride

Pathetic Armada

•December 29, 2007 • Leave a Comment

Today’s paper came with an anemic Car section as usual, ever since Craig Newmark gutted the want-ad section of urban newspapers across the country. I guess this has meant that automobile companies have to pay more now to keep this section of advertorial alive. It looks like it’s on life support, with readers shouldering a good bit of the storytelling (“we want to know why you drive what you drive”) to save a bit of coin and perhaps even get a little focus group work done too. But the copy for the ‘review’ (=ad) of the Nissan Armada just made me crawl over here to my scratching post to yowl.

This Army of One weighs around 3 tonnes, uses a gallon for every 12 miles covered (assuming 20k miles/year, the average in USA among people who aren’t retired), and takes up as much room as a vacation cabin. The makers must feel the heat from The Hummer, that iconic symbol of gleeful, in-your-face waste.

So in a style less macho, and more suited to genteel eco-assassins in perpetual denial, Nissan intones: “more luxurious for full-size SUV buyers (I thought that genre was dying!)…the 2008 gets a complete face-lift… (guess you wouln’t want to be caught in the 2007 anymore, eh?). Beefy wheels (WHEN is that word going to be considered brutishly derogatory?), heightened safety ‘for my grandkids’.

Ah, the perceived safety of the grandkids…does anyone know about the heightened risk to all the people OUTSIDE the car?

Tim Harford, the undercover economist who writes a column in London’s Financial Times put it best:
The trouble with cars these days is that they’re too safe. Of course, I don’t write as a driver; I write as a cyclist. Drivers quite reasonably feel that they’re so well protected by their seatbelts, bull-bars, airbags, ejector seats and the rest that they can afford to take risks. Cyclists and pedestrians are the ones on the receiving end.

For several years I’ve been watching the automobile industry ply us with ads that have flowers encircling the vehicle, paeans to the simpler sixties when everything floral was good…and the copy instructs us that these new cars are cleaning up the air, improving quality of life, etc.

How in the world, without a fat budget, are we to get word out that this is all lies, and the only freedom is outside the machine, moving yourself?

I hope that (when ‘beefy’ is an insult) young people will eschew jobs in advertising and take their chances in a barter economy while we stagger away from the materials economy and into a more sustainable future. It’s late already and I KNOW that my neighbors will never ever opt to walk or ride. I can’t even imagine showing their kids The Story Of Stuff!

There is such thing as not working for car companies, not working for ad agencies that glorify consumption and sell garbage (did you know that 1 % of all we buy per year lasts into the next year….the rest is put in the trash?
Dig in….refuse to add refuse.

Arm yourself and watch out for those SUVs.

Posted in cars, Cycling, Jacquie Phelan

Frost all over

•December 25, 2007 • 1 Comment

White rime on the redwood deckboards.. enough to slide several feet on…yep. Our wimpy winter is here. This expanse between F-gham Palace and the stairs to Taj Mahovel begs to be marked up somehow. Only a few years from now, winter will be ‘falling season”, and unintended slips will scare the shit outta me, once the bones are brittled up. For the moment, though, they retain their bounce, and I leave a jagged pair of arcs …

Gallop downstairs to see if the newly applied bubble-wrap in the windows really kept the residual woodstove BTU’s inside the shack. A wall of warmth clouds my glasses. The cheap insulation works! We won’t be burning quite as much this winter, yay!!
The light coming in through dot patterned plastic is diffuse, and if anything, brighter…. as if the convexity of the bubbles ricochets more light indoors.

We’ve only a couple of hours to fabricate cheesy ‘presents’ (dig up ol’ wrapping paper, glue childishly-awful bows on top, barely tape the thing together and…presto. Simu-Elation of an earlier time when presents mattered so damn much, and being in fifth grade let you get away with bad wrapping).

We still like presents but can’t remember to shop for them. They tend to fall in our laps, and then we just hand them over regardless of time of year, when we find them.
Besides, who has the restraint to wait ’til winter?

But there are others to think of.

And an Other I barely noticed.

Down the street lives a kid I’ve watched grow into the kind of girl that walks home alone, thinking. High school students travel either in packs, or as loners here in Fairfax…I tend to think of the group-types as ….less clever. THis of course is a heinous bias. Might even just be justifying my own million solitary (rides) home from school. Her mom once told me that “Girl” is into fashion, used to keep a rat, didn’t ride a bike like her brother, or their dad the fireman. I had a thought: drag her out on a ride. Crumpled that thought up.
Burned it. Better to meet her on the fashion front, where I’m Miss Uninformed.
Learn a little.
Well, I never did.
THen…a couple years pass since her mom told me that Girl liked rats.
And yesterday a neatly wrapped, soft package with” to Jacquie” on a ribbon sat in the mailbox.
Kid’s name turns out to be Allison, and she has knitted me cashmere mittenettes, fingerless ones.
Varicolored blue/purple yarn.
I about died.
This demanded a response.

I piled three books into a red velvet purse I had lying about:
Fashion Statements by Frederica Postman and Bonnie Stone (an artist book),
“Amuse buch “, a velveteen clad chapbook I couldn’t wait to see published. I made Carol C. put it together, it’s on cycling for grownups, and lastly,
the L.L. Queen Catalogue( 2006), a very primitive version of an artist’s book by someone who has no sewing, biinding, printing or planning skills, and wants to surprise the talented book artist in the family. In it, I glued collages depicting every imagineable service (magic carpet=chauffeurage, ironing, catering weekly, massage, shopping) plus some outlandish Things (New Guinea tribal basketry–the towering humanoid ones), a crown for a true queen, a Tiffany tote –since we can’t afford what goes inside…et cetera.

Ran them down, handed them over while gushing about my new mitts.

“I can only loan these since they’re one-offs, but you might get a kick out of them…” and I ran off before I fell apart trying to find out what I’d done to deserve such largesse from a barely noticed neighbor.

Well there was that time, three months ago, when I was picking olives at midnight…and she was at the house I was collecting in front of…and the man o’house was getting ready to drive Girl home to Dogbark Ln. Three blocks –short blocks–away.

“YOU’RE going to DRIVE?” I exclaimed, looking up from the gutter and extinguishing the flashlight. Excuse me but there’s an obesity epidemic on, in the middle of a climate catastrophe (no suguar coating things here).

I’m WALKING YOU HOME.

(The father of the family felt like he had to drive his sitter home to uphold standards of Good Neighborliness, etc.) It was a gorgeous moony night.

Oh wait it was a year ago, cos olives are only in winter… OK, backdate it a year. And thus it was that I walked Girl home, blabbing (actually mostly listening) about her interests, life, etc.

Posted in clothes, food, Jacquie Phelan, Night, The Book

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