I got nothing, friends.

Well, wait: I've got some photos. Friar and Squire built a new compost
bin cause we outgrew the little one, and we expected to just turn the
compost into a larger container but no, in six months we've gone from
"hehn, I dunno, toss it on the compost with the rest of the shit" for
egg cartons, vegetable peels, weeds, etc., to the blackest loamiest
lushest soil I could have imagined. Like, people would pay for compost
of this quality, really. I
don't know if anybody's interested in that sort of thing but I feel
really like superwoman about it, because a job that does itself is the
best job of all. Plus there is nothing more fun than fitting "shit"
into conversations like "we moved some shit from one place to another"
or "we turned that shit around" or "I was up to my knees in shit this
weekend" etc. For your viewing, I've only posted pics of the bin construction, cause some people are afraid of dirt (?).

Oh, and also some good, non-composty shit: My sister came to visit and
it was incredible. It was basically like a
year's worth of crashing walls and ensuing revelations condensed into
10 days of awesome. I feel really clear on some things and I feel
pretty good about others. Also I feel really lucky to have such a cool
sister, which I always feel that way but now even more so. It was the
first time she's hung with Friar, and the longest time she's hung with
Squire like since he was born, and it meant the world.

At her suggestion, I moved my desk into the living room in the hopes of
separating work
from the central hub of the house, which is the kitchen, because it was
messing me up to work when I wanted to eat and to be thinking about
work when I wanted to be socializing. The central hub of activity now
seems to be moving into the living room, which is funny. However, my
keyboard doesn't smell like cooking oil so much, so there's that.

In other news, and there will not be photos, I'm signed up
for a belly dancing class with my friend who runs the school where the
class is, because they need students. I am curious.

My sister is visiting and she is smart and beautiful and wonderful and all the good adjectives you can think of, basically. Shortly before she left, the woman compressed and fractured her vertebrae falling off a swingset
that her husband built for her to scale (pause for a moment and think about how cool that swingset is), and I was afraid she wouldn't make it, but she's standing in the
kitchen making banana bread with my son right now. Eventually I may get around to posting stories and pictures but at the moment I am theoretically working so that later we can head out to the beer garden. I am having too much fun.

I am recycling an old idea I once had about visiting all the restaurants that have their menus in English and offering to edit the menus in exchange for a few free meals.

Something’s gotta happen. I mean, this can’t keep up, right? But I’m sitting here thinking that when I came here it was 32 kc to the dollar and 8 Kc for a beer, and I was making Czech crowns and paying off dollar debts; now it’s 14.5 Kc to the dollar and at least 25 Kc for a beer, and I’m making dollars, and I can’t even begin to explain how incapable I am of writing math problems sufficiently intricate to reflect my frustration with this particular state of affairs.

I think I could probably do something with this, though. Do you think they’d feed me? Better yet, would I get some free beer out of it? Right before my eyeses?

Greece persists in being very hot and beautiful. We saw giant turtles
being chased like they were starlets without panties. We played games
until we had adopted each other’s playing style. We stayed in the water
until we got burn lines where the salt had buoyed us up; water lines
are the new bathing suit lines. We ate feta a hundred different ways,
including on fire; elopement with various dishes was proposed and then
of course I had to bring in the possibility of spouse-swapping down the
road to keep things interesting and then there was that awkward silence
like when you realize you’re the last guest at the party. We observed
all manner of dress and undress. It is hard to be a parent and persuade
your child of the virtues of
dressing for dinner when the woman next to you is wearing a hotel
towel. We had garbage thrown at us while we were collecting trash on
the beach (to compensate for being human, but then maybe we aren’t the
humans you need to watch out for). The things people will leave on a
beach would not amaze you. I fell off of a raft because everybody likes
to see a pratfall. We finished reading Tom Sawyer and had to get a book
on Greek myths to determine how many pomegranate seeds Persephone ate.
I won every game except the ones I lost. It is possible that between us
we caught a frisbee more than twice. We explored the uses of yogurt and
aloe vera and finally slept until it didn’t hurt anymore. Then we came home. Pictures start here.

Squire finished breakdance classes for the year. The final performance was very sweet, though I only cried a couple times (I cry at children's performances the way some people cry at weddings).

Last night there were storms of such intensity that for a while, sitting in my friend's upstairs apartment, which has quite a view, I managed to persuade myself that it was actually a post-modern fireworks show, and different parts of the city were illuminated in turn, each beautiful and strange and eerie for just a second.

At the cottage this weekend we wound up going to a bonfire at the neighbors', where my extreme discomfort at finding myself in mullet-ville, where jokes about Asians are punctuated by pulling your eyes slant and talking funny, was nearly balanced by the facts that I did not have to play Voice Of America and that nobody acted insulted that I didn't want a big chunk of meat. Squire had kids to play with and that was nice.

I am not in the best of all places, marriage-wise. I told Friar that there was not a thing I could say that he wouldn't see the downside to, and it's starting to make me not want to plan anything or even talk about anything with him. I told him I could buy him a lifetime supply of his favorite cigarettes and he wouldn't be pleased by the idea. And he was like, "Something could get damp, and the tobacco could get moldy, and then of course where would I store them… no, no, it's not a good idea." and I bit a hole in my tongue and went back to thinking my own thoughts in my head.

We saw the first fireflies of the summer last week.

I have a lot of trouble with physical interaction lately, I mean my interaction with the physical world. Everything seems like a line and you have to decide whether you're crossing over it. Like even patterns on clothing are starting to bother me. You get stripes, then you can't get polka dots. Why would you limit yourself like that? So I'm all in solid black again, basically, because then I'm ready for anything.

Also, I went to town with the clippers yesterday, because hair also seems like a decision that means you have to make other decisions. My hair is currently shorter than an inch at its longest, with the exception of the braid, to which I have grown rather attached.

We had a great pizza after Family Therapy the other day, and the waitress realized I was foreign but thought I was the only one who spoke Czech and so addressed all interaction to me. It was adorable. Also when I tipped her she thought it was too much (15%, which is kind of high here, but she had given me a free glass of wine), and so concluded it was a language problem and brought it back to me and carefully put it in my hand. Small things keep my hope for humanity afloat.

Uh, Squire and I going to Greece next week. If you want a postcard, send me your address.

conversations I did not expect to have more than once, bathroom edition:

• This is a laundry basket. The dirty clothes go IN the basket: not next to, not on top of, not near: IN.
• This is my comb. That is your comb. I do not like to share combs, which is why you have your very own.
• This is a toothbrush stand. The toothbrush lives there. Please put the toothbrush back after you have brushed your teeth.
• Fairies do not replace toiletries. A real live human must be alerted in
  order for your toiletries to be replaced.
• The shower is not self-cleaning. If there is anything on the walls when
  you are done with your shower, please rinse it off.
• This is a bath mat.
  The bath mat lives on the side of the tub. Please return the bath mat
  to its home after you have had your shower.
• This is a toilet. Again, the preposition is IN. Not ON or NEAR or NEXT TO: IN.
• This is a sink. It is for washing your hands. Wash your hands before you leave the bathroom.
• This is a towel. It is for drying things, including hands. Dry your hands after you wash them and before you leave the bathroom.
• This is a cat box. The cat needs access to it. Please do not close the door all the way before you go to sleep at night.