Spring Sorting

It's the first weekend before summer break officially begins (and I don't have any papers to grade) so I've been keeping myself busy.

Friday night I went thrift store shopping with a friend and then indulged in a Downton Abbey season two marathon at long last.  I loved the way it ended, but I'm still wondering about Patrick Crawley...  Thoughts on this?

Today I bustled around the house doing the usual laundry and picking up routine.  Our peonies are blooming, so I cut off the ones that were drooping to the ground or hidden in the fence and filled a vase with them.  I love them so much and they smell so good that it's totally worth the little black ants that inevitably come inside with them.

I haven't tackled the bathroom yet, or my closet (bathroom's on the agenda for tomorrow), but I did do a little spring cleaning/sorting on the computer.  It's not quite as satisfying, but I went through my pictures and organized them all by date and subject label.  I'd been putting this off because I knew there would be some heartache since my "2011 photos" folder is not filled with countless files labeled "Eliza's first ___" and "Eliza meets ____" but instead things like "Florida," "Dogs," and "More Dogs."

Thank goodness for those dogs, though.  For a while there, they were the only things that could make me smile.

Cooper likes to put the corner of his bed in his mouth.  It's like a pacifier.

Little Mac "hides" in David's shirts.

Astonished that we found her in her hiding spot.

Skeptically waiting for the treat I promised.

Cooper surfs the web unsupervised.

Anyway, I put all the pictures on an external hard drive, which we store in a fireproof box with our important paperwork, passports, and a couple of precious keepsakes of Eliza's (plaster molds of her hands and feet, her little hat).  It felt good to get that taken care of.

I also cleaned up the desktop, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need.  I should continue to sort through My Documents and get rid of things, but instead I sat out on the deck in a rocking chair and read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society for the third time.  I absolutely love that book, and it makes my heart itch every time.  If you haven't read it, it's a (fictional) collection of letters--an epistolary novel--describing the lives and experiences of people who lived on Guernsey Island while it was occupied by Germans during World War II.  There's a lot of terrible things in there (I don't suppose you can write about any war without the terribleness coming into it) but a lot of hopeful and funny things, too.

This passage especially struck a chord with me today--it's from a letter written by a woman whose son died in the war:

...visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said "Life goes on."  What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't.  It's death that goes on; [he] is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever.  There's no end to that.  But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.  Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede.  But already, there are small islands of--hope?  Happiness?  Something like them, at any rate.

I made some brownies with a secret special ingredient:  black beans.  Really the whole recipe is just brownie mix, pureed can of black beans (undrained) and 1/4 cup water.

Confession:  I don't care for them.  I don't know if it's because I know they have black beans in them and I can't get past it (even though I love black beans), or if it's because they have a fudgy texture while I prefer cake-like brownies, or if they were slightly underdone because David took them out of the oven too early (I was wrapped up in my photo organization but should have gotten off the couch to check them myself).  Anyway, they are worth a try but I don't think I'll be repeating this Secret Ingredient Brownie recipe.

We went out to look at the moon tonight.  It was big and beautiful, but it wasn't long before I was chased back inside by vicious mosquitoes who managed to bite me more than half a dozen times. I said a prayer and made a wish and came inside to do a kick count.