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It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
— Mark Twain

Boy, it’s been busy around here.  Let me try to catch you up:

Last Saturday, David and I went out to Loudon Valley Vineyards to “cash in” on David’s Christmas present from Nate and Molly.  Saturdays during the winter (well, November through March), you can go there and have a glass of wine and a bowl of soup for $12.  This past Saturday was the last one of the season, so despite the rainy weather, we decided to go for it.  And boy were we glad we did!  The soup was Beef Burgundy, which I’ve never had before, but it was SO good!  Look:

I don’t know if it’s traditional to serve Beef Burgudy over egg noodles, but I can tell you I never want to eat it any other way.  And if anyone has a tried and true recipe for this, I would be grateful if you’d share it.

That night, we picked up my mom from the Metro – she was in town last week for conferences – and then met my uncle in Old Town for dinner.  We had planned to go to a French restaurant, but I didn’t think ahead to make a reservation, so we went to the tapas restaurant where David and I had our first date and then my birthday dinner.  Everything was, as always, delicious, and my mom and uncle raved about the food, so I considered it a success.  We took my mom back to her hotel in Georgetown by way of the Tidal Basin so she could see the early cherry blossoms.  I took some pictures, but they aren’t that great, since it was foggy and dark; hopefully I’ll get down there during lunch one day this week and get some better ones.

Sunday was more unpacking.  You would not believe the amount of stuff we have, and we’ve already given tons of it away.  We still have two boxes plus a small vacuum cleaner to take to Goodwill sometime this week.  It’s unbelievable, truly.

Oh, we also went for the first bike ride of the season Sunday.  It was a perfect day for it, and we rode for about an hour or so, on trails neither of us had ever been on and discovered some new places.  It was wonderful.

Yesterday, I got up early and went for a long walk in the park nearby.  I love getting my exercise in early – then I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the day.  It was gorgeous, if a little windy and nippy in the morning.

Later, we went to the nursery to pick out tomato plants.  I’m determined to have a crop this year, unlike last year.  David has done quite a bit of research (one reason we’re so compatible is he thinks, I do) and we talked to the guy at the nursery and we picked out two varieties that we hope will do well on our balcony.  Here they are after we transplanted them today:

They’re not that tall now, but we’ll transplant them again into bigger pots when they grow out of these.  We’re also going to plant cucumbers in early May.  I’m hopeful.  Cross your fingers for us.

I asked the nursery guy about seeds to grow in a window box out on the patio and he said it’s really too late for seeds, that we should go with plants that have already sprouted – I suppose that’s why my Alyssum didn’t flower last year.  At least, I hope it is.  In my zeal, I bought a whole flat of purple Alyssum that had already sprouted and flowered a bit, never once thinking that it would be too much, but it totally is.  So I have 3/4 of a flat of Alyssum if you need it.  Just let me know!

We headed to Home Depot for potting soil and more plants, but on the way there, we were witness to a pretty serious car accident, so we got waylaid for about 45 minutes.  We were in the right lane and a car was stopped to turn left from the left lane.  David slowed down just in time to see an SUV speed by us on the left and slam into the back of the car waiting to turn left.  David said he’d slowed down because he saw the car waiting to turn and saw the SUV and wanted to give the lady in the SUV space to get over and go around the car.  I don’t know what she was doing – she had kids in the car, maybe they distracted her – but by the time she saw him and slammed on her breaks, she had no chance to stop.

The car waiting to turn had its trunk completely totaled, and its rear windshield ended up in pieces on the hood of the SUV.  There were four teenagers in that car, and they all appeared to be ok.  I don’t know how neither of the two in the back seat were injured, given how far in the trunk got smashed, but what a relief.  I called the police while David directed traffic around the accident.  The police, fire, and ambulance came, we gave a statement, the mother got taken to the hospital on a gurney, probably as a precaution, and the kids’ father came and took them in his car.  So, all in all, everyone was very lucky.

After that, we finally made it to Home Depot and spent an hour choosing flowers and getting potting soil, window boxes, plant food, and cucumber seed.  $100 later, we headed home.  David put the window boxes together, and then we had a good dinner of pulled pork from the crock pot, baked beans, and corn.  Yum.  We also watched Milk, which was excellent, and I highly recommend it.  The bonus features were also very interesting (and subtitled!  Which, thankfully, is becoming more common, but unfortunately, is not yet required).

This morning, I potted all my flowers and put them in their window boxes.  Here are my petunias:

And here are my geraniums:

I love them.  I hope I don’t kill them.

I finally got the guest room in usable order today, though all the books are still in boxes, awaiting the arrival another bookshelf, which is coming from my parents, so god knows when I’ll get it.  Everything is coming together, and except for three boxes of David’s stuff in the den, and the books, everything is unpacked.  Thank goodness for that.

We went for another bike ride this afternoon, again on a different trail and again seeing all kinds of new things.  It’s so much fun!  The weather is beautiful again today, so that’s lucky.  Now we’re back, showered, and relaxing.  I’m waiting for 8pm, when my Braves take on the Phillies in the first game of the new baseball season!  In honor of the day, I’ve changed my Facebook profile picture to this one:

Yay for baseball!

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
— Victor Hugo

1. The way my mom sometimes accidentally ends her voice mail messages like they’re letters: “Love, Mom”

2. That my grandma celebrates her 85th birthday today

3. Moving in with your best friend (this was put in the notebook when Aimee and I first shared an apartment in Richmond about 9 years ago, but it’s equally applicable now that David and I have moved in together)

What’s making you happy today?

The great quality of Spaniards is their vitality.  This is not a surface vitality like that of the Neapolitans, but involves their whole nature.  It makes them a pleasant people to live among.
— from Thoughts in a Dry Season, by Gerald Brenan*

1. Ordinary places that take on special meaning due to events that happen or people you meet (I can pinpoint when I made this entry by its place among the others above and below it – it’s from when I studied abroad in Salamanca, Spain during my junior year in college – and there are too many places there that became special to me)

2. Enjoying working out and looking forward to going to the gym

3. Organizing your space (slowly but surely, the apartment is coming together – just don’t ask to see the guest room)

What are you happy about or thankful for today?

* I bought this book in outdoor book market in Nice on a trip to France with my grandma in 2003 – I gave the book to J, but not before copying all of my favorite thoughts from it into my quote book.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
— Samuel Johnson

This is too wild not to share – I saw it on Sociological Images this morning and was flabbergasted.  Granted, I don’t use Photoshop, but I had no idea something like this was even possible.  Angela Merkel, in case you don’t know, is the Prime Minister of Germany.  And if you don’t know who Paris Hilton is, then I salute you.  The video is totally safe for work, by the way.

[Update: I don’t know why the video won’t embed -I’ve tried four times – but here’s the YouTube link, or you can just go to the original Sociological Images post via the link above.  Apparently, I’m too dumb to blog.]

Unbelieveable, right?  I mean, the hair at the end is a bit off, but the rest is dead on.  And I laughed so much at the constant orang-ing of the skin needed to go from “Prime Minister” to “celebutante” in under 4 minutes.

When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn’t the old home you missed, but your childhood.
— Sam Ewing

This is the house in Pennsylvania I lived in from the time I was 6 until I was 9:

David and I were at a wedding in New Jersey this weekend, and we detoured to my old neighborhood on the way back.  I’ve done this once before – in 2003, I gave Nate tickets to see the Cubs v. the Phillies during the last season at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia (that’s the first professional baseball game we ever saw when we were kids living outside Philly).  The weekend we were there, we decided to take the El out to near where we used to live and go see our old house.  This weekend’s experience, just like that one, has left me pensive.

This is what I think of as my childhood home, though we only lived there for three years.  It’s one half of a duplex, I guess they call it, and before I went back in 2003, I would have described it — and been convinced I was right — as having all white siding on the front, but I’d have been wrong.  Also, when we lived there, the front of the property was bordered by a two-foot high retaining wall on top of which grew very tall hedges.  You could hardly see the house from the street.  The fence around the back yard was chain link, not wood like it is now.   The people who live there now have added a play area in the back yard that’s got mulch in it, but otherwise, everything’s the same.

Except it isn’t.

The street itself is so small.  Cars parallel park on either side, and there’s only room for one-way driving down the middle.  I would swear it was bigger when I was a kid – the houses across the street were surely farther away than they were yesterday.  Weren’t they?  And the alley behind it – we don’t have alleys in Virginia – I can remember my friends and I racing down it on our bikes, from the top of the street to the bottom, and being gleefully frightened at the speed with which we were descending such a steep hill.  As a grown up, though, I can tell you that the incline in the alley is 15 degrees, tops.

I looked at the windows, remembering what lay behind each one when we lived there, narrating for David – those two in the front upstairs, that was my parents’ room.  Downstairs, the front door opened into the living room where I celebrated my 8th birthday with a Cabbage Patch Kid-themed party, having gotten my first (and only) Cabbage Patch doll that Christmas.  In the back, the window on the left, that was my tiny room, barely big enough for my twin bed and dresser.  On the right, Nathaniel’s, except when we had to share while my dad used my room for research when he was writing his dissertation.  That window in the back, to the right of the screen door, was the dining room, and my bicycle (a hand-me-down boy’s bike from my uncle) got stolen from underneath it. I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when I looked down out of the window in Nathaniel’s room and realized it was gone.

We used to drink from the hose hooked up to the side of the house – nothing tastes like water right from the hose, does it?  The latch on the back gate gave too easily, and our sheepdog, Shad, used to regularly get out of the yard and roam the neighborhood.  I can hear us calling after her even now.  Nathaniel and I once tried to sell lemonade and iced tea from our front porch, no easy feat considering the tall hedges out front and the fact that it was probably a weekday in the summer.  To make up for our poor location, we yelled “Lemonade!  Iced Tea!” at all the cars passing by.  My parents’ room was above the front porch, and my dad was sleeping in that day.  He yelled at us to be quiet.  I don’t think we made much money.

I can still remember the slightly musty smell that hit you when you opened the door from the kitchen to go down to the basement.  Oh, the basement – we don’t really have basements in Virgina, either.  Nathaniel and I spent hours down there, especially on rainy days.  We used to roller skate along the smooth concrete floor, crashing into the walls at either end (it wasn’t very big).  We played games and made up stories – we had these hand puppets, one was a raccoon and one was a sheep, and we decided they were detectives.  There was even a theme song.

David and I walked up the alley; I pointed out the space between the houses on the other side where I used to cut through to go to my friend’s house.  At the top of the alley we made a u-turn and came down my old street from the end.  From up there, I pointed out my old baby-sitter’s house and the church where I used to have Brownie meetings.  On the way down, I recalled the particular front porch on which I spent many hours with another friend playing “Hotel” – which, as far as I can remember, consisted of us pretending someone was calling on the old phone we had and making pretend reservations at our hotel for various invented people.

When Nathaniel and I visited, I didn’t recognize where we got off the El, and we walked for a good 20 minutes from there before I recognized anything.  I was struck then how much of a difference the two years in age must make, that he knew the way home from the El even after 17 years, and I had no clue.  My whole world then basically consisted of the three blocks that included my elementary school one block over, my street, and the street on the other side of the alley where several of my friends lived.   Big enough for a nine-year old for sure, but tiny in retrospect.

In my heart, though, it’s still big enough for all the memories we made there.