three photos + attendant text, which will explain what I have been up to

i.
James and I got an alarm system for our house. This may seem alarmist (ha!) and in fact, I have always been a bit dismissive of those people who apparently think their stuff is so precious they need to protect it with sophisticated electronics. (Plus! What if someone STEALS YOUR ALARM SYSTEM?) And yet! Now that I am a homeowner I feel this same paranoia creeping in. Our neighbour's house was broken into a few weeks ago, and this spurred us on. Also, in the less-than-a-year we've been living in this neighbourhood, our car was broken into (just before we totalled it, so... not really a big deal, in the long run, although we did have to replace a window) and we're pretty sure someone broke into our garage and--ignoring our garden tools, appliances, leftover wedding alcohol, and German CAR--stole our bags of pop bottles to be recycled. So it's not like there's no cause for concern. Soon I may start voting Conservative. (ADDITIONALLY! Probably if we really let the Conservatives do their thing, there would be no recycling at all, and therefore less reason for people to break into our garage. So a reduction in crime might occur, unrelated to the death penalty or whatever it is they're always claiming is the Missing Conservative Ingredient for a happy society. I may have to put up some kind of sign on my lawn. Vote Conservative for no more recycling-stealing!)


ii.
The Chapters haul from the past few days. What is it with the piles of cheap books? I cannot resist them. They are my nerdy girl Kryptonite. Unavoidably, they are books that I would never otherwise buy. Well, except I kind of almost would, obviously. Since I do. The only one that was not on sale was Scarlett Fever, which I am already in the midst of reading. The Joyce Carol Oates one I bought because there was a book of hers (Foxfire) that I read as a teenager which I absolutely incorporated into my brain. Like it was religion. Anyway, these bring me up to 612, according to my trusty LibraryThing. Plus the additional 185,000 or so I have access to through work, although at least ten of those are The Secret, so it's probably more like 184,990 that I would actually want to read. [Of the three E. L. Konigsburg books in that collection, I already owned at least two and maybe all three of them, but it just broke my heart to see a stack of her books sitting there alongside books with names like Vampire Crush High or Teen Vampire Sex Party whatever. E. L. Konigsburg books should never be marked down! So really, this purchase was a political protest.]


iii.
so, this is cheezy in that cheezy way I have, but I can't help it; I planted dill, oregano and parsley seeds from the farmer's market WEEKS AGO! and they are finally sprouting. I had actually almost given up on them and then I decided to cover them with saran wrap (the working woman's greenhouse) and give them a little more time. These seedlings were just poking through the soil's surface when I left this morning and when I came home they had grown several centimetres. This suggests that if I had sat on top of the freezer, I would have been able to watch them grow, probably. I'm not saying that would have been terribly exciting, but given how excited I was to see them when I came home, perhaps I'm sad I missed it. I am lucky to live in a world such as this, Internet.


PS. Headache not gone. Mono?