After about 4 years, my spider plants are finally reproducing. I can’t get over how lovely spider plant blossoms are. They are like a cross between an orchid and a jasmine blossom.

I have the cover story in the Pacific Sun this week. I interviewed novelist Anne Lamott and playwrights Laurel Graver and Ann Brebner about the adaptation of Lamott’s novel, Hard Laughter, into a play. I really enjoyed writing this one–all three ladies were just delightful to talk to.

In another article, I interviewed Albert Flynn DeSilver, the first Marin County Poet Laureate. As part of that, I got to go to see Billy Collins read some poetry at the Marin Academy High School.

I lead a good life.

Read about Hard Laughter here, and the poet laureate here.

Once I painted the guest room, I began the search for a comforter or duvet for the bed in there. I quickly discovered that comforters are:

a. Expensive
b. Ugly

The ones I liked were, without exception, over $230–a good deal more than I would be willing to spend on an oversized pillowcase. On top of that, the room was yellow, which proved to be a difficult color to match accessories to. If you go yellow on the bed, your room becomes nauseatingly cheerful. If you go away from yellow, you risk clashing or fighting with the color.

Finally, I decided to make the bedspread. After a lot of shopping, I came upon this beautiful French-navy-and-white heavy cotton at Joann Fabrics. It was $30 a yard, though. Apparently my expensive taste doesn’t just extend to bedspreads. However, I happened upon it when it was 50% off, so it ended up being $15 per yard. So, I bought a large panel and framed it in this off-white cotton poly, which was going for $2 per yard.

So overall, I got a darn nice bedspread for $60-$75. It still wasn’t free, but it looks as good as most of the ones I saw in the stores–AND I have enough cotton/poly left for curtains and pillows.

Last night I went out to Cajun food with Justin, Marcia, Stephanie, and Kyle. It was a lot of fun. I had never had crawfish before. Tiny lobsters! I enjoy food that takes a lot of work to eat. Justin has some pictures on his blog.

Crawfish from last night’s dinner. Photo taken by Justin Watt directly before consuming said crawfish.

This has been an insane week. I am glad it’s almost over. A lot of things happened this week, many of them cool. I got to:

• Interview the novelist Anne Lamott
• See poet Billy Collins read at the Marin Academy
• Eat tapas in San Rafael with Kyle
• Interview the playwrights who are adapting Lamott’s book for stage
• Take Kyle to the airport for his stint at Penguicon
• Watch Kyle tech-edit a chapter for a new publisher
• Write a book review for the San Francisco Chronicle
• Pay my taxes (not fun!)
• Have the Word Pirates over to plan our upcoming reading for May 15
• Celebrate the Word Pirates’ second birthday
• Re-edit an article that an editor had some questions on (also not fun)
• Interview people about the upcoming Marin Poet Laureate
• Write a couple of articles
• Get a ride in Marcia’s new car
• Make a bedspread for my guest room (pictures coming)

Next week looks a little saner. I have two articles due and am having dinner with friends. And that’s it. Whew.

The birds are crazy this year. I hear them all day long. This morning I had a dream that hummingbirds were building nests in my backyard, and then I woke up and realized it was because the birds outside my window were so loud they had invaded my dream. A few minutes ago, a little bird lighted on the screen of my window with a twig in its mouth. Every time I go outside, jays are perching in the branches of my baby fruit trees. Yesterday, a black bird flew into my kitchen window, but didn’t seem seriously hurt.

The neatest part of all this is that a red finch family has built a nest in my garage. Every time I go into the backyard, the female flies away and sits in the branches of the mystery tree in an attempt to distract me from her nest.

The other day I decided to read outside. When I went into the backyard, the female flitted to the tree as usual. As I sat out there for awhile, she grew bolder and flew back to her nest and hopped around the outside of it, looking at me. Right as she was about to get back in it, she flew away again. I looked over my shoulder and realized that my cat Quill had entered the backyard. As he meowed and rubbed against me, the female bird sat in the tree and looked worried. After awhile, the male bird joined her. He was just like her, except he had a bright red neck and face. Together, they flew to the roof about two feet from the nest and looked over at Quill, who was rolling on his back on the cement and chattering at them. They looked so upset that I took pity on them and left the yard, calling Quill with me so that they could have their little bird family in peace.

The down side to all these birds is that I am trying to grow a. raspberries, b. strawberries, and c. cherries. It’s going to be a battle to get any of these for myself. Already, my bean seedlings keep mysteriously disappearing as soon as they sprout. However, there are very few pill bugs this year. It’s a trade-off.

The first fruit of my labor: a radish.

On Saturday, I went to San Francisco with Marcia and watched her purchase art and furniture. You can read about our day on her blog.

On Sunday, it was unbelievably gorgeous, so Kyle and I decided to take a trip through Marin and check out the town of Bolinas. I had heard a lot about Bolinas–how it is filled with colorful characters, how you have to drive through country roads to get to it, and how the locals hate tourists and remove signposts to keep outsiders from finding their town.

It was indeed hard to find. It took over an hour to get there, although it’s not far from Petaluma. It was a gorgeous drive; we wound through springtime hills, past quaint towns, flowering trees, and cows. Finally, we ended up passing the fork that goes off to Bolinas and went to Stinson Beach instead. The sign to Bolinas was indeed missing.

And when I got to Stinson Beach, I understood why the locals removed the sign. It was full of horrible people! Well, maybe not horrible. But the kind of people who buy $700 bathing suits and work out in gyms and treat every situation as a personal fashion show and meat market. I was surprised to see them out in Marin with their surf boards and their artfully shredded designer beach wear, standing in line in the the overpriced gourmet grocery store with their plastic tubs of tuna-and-olive salads and Naked juice. Needless-to-say, we didn’t stay long in Stinson Beach.

(As I was standing outside waiting for Kyle to use the restroom, I noticed this odd situation. This woman was hugging her … daughter? … while talking on the phone while her son looked on behind them. They stood like this for something like 7 minutes. It was strange because a. they didn’t move and b. the woman on the phone was so disconnected from the hug she was giving. I don’t quite know what to make of it.)

Bolinas, once we found it, was quite charming. It wasn’t what I expected. The town wound down a road and was full of beach houses, book stores, and hotels. It didn’t have a lot more than that. Maybe it was the beautiful day, or all the flowering plants everywhere, but it started to remind me of Santa Cruz with the surfers and hippies walking around. It didn’t feel like Marin at all.

We ended up walking around downtown and then sitting on the beach people watching. I had originally hoped to watch nature in Bolinas, but there were too many people around for that. So I watched the array of surfers, rich people, college students, children, dogs, hippies, and eccentric locals instead. On the way home, we stopped at the Marin Cheese Factory and tasted cheese and watched a child drag a stick in a pond. It was a good day.

Woman and baby

“Vote for Bolinas
Socially Acknowledged
Nature loving Town

Because
To like to drink the
water out of the lakes
to like to eat the blueberries
to like the bears is
Not hatred to hotels
and Motorboats
Dakar
Temporary and Way
to save life skunks
and foxes (airplanes
to go over the ocean)
and to make it
BEAUTIFUL

– Measure G Ballot Initiative
passed Nov. 4, 2003″

??

Couple and their poodles

Kyle and I were agreeing that it is a waste of money to buy a child a wet suit. Then, right as I was snapping this photo, the child in the middle said, “Hey Marie, do you want to go body surfing later?”

My new desktop

Bolinas Lagoon, with the tide almost completely out. Clams were spitting water into the air like tiny geysers.

Can you see the dog?

Yesterday, Kyle was invited to speak at Google about remastering Knoppix. Here is a video of his speech.

If you have used Knoppix long enough, you have probably eventually decided you would like to tweak it to add a setting or package. Most people resort to the full remastering process–uncompressing and changing the loopback file system–and are faced with a complicated, time-consuming process. In this talk Kyle Rankin will discuss a number of different methods you can use to change Knoppix’s default behavior while bypassing the compressed loopback file system

Also, Kyle is handsome!

I am still planting. Can you believe it? I put in the herb garden last week. I had the stump guys come out and remove two stumps from the flower bed (chipping the driveway in the process), then planted lettuce, nasturtium, chives, sage, rosemary, cilantro, thyme, oregano, parsley and our lime tree.

In the vegetable garden, I am starting to harvest radishes. My carrots and beets are still tiny seedlings, which is alarming, but there isn’t much I can do other than frowning at them every time I go out to the garden. The peas and spinach, however, look good. I stuck some rooting potatoes in the ground, although I will be shocked if they come up. Still to plant sometime this month: a dwarf orange or tangerine bush, artichokes, strawberries, melons, tomatoes, green onions, sunflowers, squash, and lots and lots of peppers.

A trick I discovered: Next time you buy a bunch of green onions from the store, slice off the roots and plant them in the ground. They will sprout a new onion for you. It works! Amazing!

Here is a poem I am relating to:

Messenger
Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Kyle will be speaking:

at Google on Thursday, April 10
at Penguicon at the end of April
at LinuxWorld next August.

… and possibly others.

I probably won’t go to any of these talk. For one thing, two of them cost money to get into. For another, watching Kyle speak makes me a nervous wreck. I really can’t stand it. I get empathetically nervous or something. In fact, I get more nervous for Kyle when he is about to speak than I would be if I were going to give the speech. It’s silly because he is an excellent speaker. Still… yikes.

Kyle is also writing a column for Linux Journal. This month, he wrote about PXE Magic: Flexible Network Booting with Menus . Doesn’t that sound important?

UPDATE: Kyle has published another article for TechTarget called Stop server monitoring tools from crying wolf.