I had so many fun friends visit me last week. The other week I took down my hummingbird feeder to clean it and because I was out of food for them. I’ve still seen hummingbirds repeatedly visiting my flowers. The bees have been all over my sunflowers and then they stay and pollinate my vegetable flowers!

Just over a week ago a toad made a home in my mulch. He’s not shy and has even come back while I’m working on the garden and reacts calmly when I need him to move to avoid getting hurt. I’ve named him Trevor and now I check on him each day.

Then today I saw a beautiful woodpecker on my neighbor’s tree.  There’s beauty all around me. In vibrant, bold colors. The marigolds I planted from seed are flowering all over the place. My Japanese eggplant has produced 9 beautiful purple fruits! My blueberries just finished their stellar show (lost one over the winter and one was struggling, so it was really all one bush producing this summer). My strawberries are all producing runners which I’m trying to root up in pots to share and relocate into a new bed for next year.

Even before the pandemic I was planning to devote more time to my garden this year. I bought the raised bed frames at the end of last year. I had my seeds organized. I wanted to move the weeds & grass off the side of my house. And I hoped I would finally figure out how to get all the rocks out of the flower bed in the front.

I don’t mind mowing my lawn. I do it in shifts because there is so much, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s the weather that makes mowing my lawn a real chore. On and off rain. Or daily downpours. Or sweat drenching humidity.  So then I decided to extend my other flower beds around the house so there would be less grass to mow. And more room to plant pollinator friendly flowers.

I might finish all that this summer. I might be working into the fall. There’s just so much to do on my own.

Which gets me to on my own. All these hours outside I am the tannest I have ever been. I hate it. It’s just a skin tone darker. Some other person’s pale winter shade. On me it just means I haven’t used enough sunscreen. Hoping nothing worse comes from it. My freckles are thick as thieves across my knees and arms and cheeks too.

My hair is also the reddest it’s been since childhood. Golden blond streaks. Vibrant orange waves. Dark red strands twined in. I wear beach hats and ball caps and whatever I can to shade my face and cover my scalp when gardening.  So it could be brighter. Maybe.

My hair is also the longest it’s ever been. Now I know, I don’t ever want hair this long again. It dips into everything. It looks amazing in a braid but it just feels like too much. Still, we’re in a pandemic and it feels like an experiment. I’m not sure when I’ll cut it. I have so many posts and internal thoughts about perfect hair. Maybe I’m just waiting for the world to be a little less awful, a little more deserving of good hair days and places to go with it.

Labels: find the good, gardening, hummingbirds, I feel it everywhere even in my red hair, perfect hair, Red hair with a curl, sunflowers, toads

Turn up the stereo
'Til everything rattles

Sun filled hikes and southern humid nights. My hair hasn’t been this red since childhood.  Technically my hair has never curled naturally, and yet here we are. Call me conceited, but having hair this red brings me so much joy. It’s not the dark auburn of Hollywood fame. My hair is like a fire opal, strands of deep red, golden blonde, bright orange and pale brown scattered and woven together. 

Jenny knows what I’m talking about. Feeling it in her red hair. 

I’m still a bit heartbroken that her show this summer sold out so quickly. It’s okay though, cause we’ll reunite again with our red red hair!

Labels: I feel it everywhere even in my red hair, Red hair with a curl

Welcome to Thirty with Jenny - single, female, childless, hair a brighter shade of red.*

I had a migraine on my birthday for the first time and it was depressing.  It was thankfully not a very painful migraine, but it was consistent, and it consistently resisted my medicine. It's not going to be my last migraine, but hopefully it will be the only one I ever have on a birthday.  I wish I was more superstitious so I could believe it was a cleanse of all the negativity of my twenties. A fresh start for the next decade of my life, a channel for good luck to flow through.

My house hunt has been consuming - time, energy, and plenty of fuel.  I'm pausing for a short bit to get myself through a heavy work load week and a trip to Las Vegas for work.  This trip has been a career goal of mine for so long, but it's coming at such a bad time this year.  I felt like I couldn't pass up this opportunity, so I said yes.  It's definitely helped reinforce the idea that advancing your career isn't the most important or defining priority.

I'm hoping to make connections and attend a few classes that will help me improve my work life. I want to create ways to destress my work load, spend more time doing things that are therapeutic for me, and leave work at the office.  Unless I can get some work from home days.

I don't know what my thirties will hold.  I don't know if Jenny is the best role model for the whole decade, but that's okay.  She's given me a lot of anthems to belt out, hold tight, and dance it out to. To stay in the light,  I just need to look for the positive and let it flow through me.


*Except technically my summer hair is like a goldenized red - darker than strawberry blonde, but not quite orange or blonde.

Labels: I feel it everywhere even in my red hair, migraine

I've been playing Arcade Fire's first EP on repeat at work this week.  It has such a dream like, magical quality to it.  Great music to de-stress with or to just keep yourself calm as situations become more stressful.

It's fitting, I kinda feel like I'm living in a dream state.  For me, I guess I dream a lot about love.  About having a connection with someone.  Sometimes it's an adventure.  Sometime it's just me fighting for someone else.  But that feeling of giddiness, like the butterflies before a first date and the excitement when you're first talking and flirting and the connection is made, that feeling is transferable for me. Not from person to person, nothing like that.  More like from dreaming in your sleep to making your dreams come true.

I guess that could be confusing.  It's a feeling and they don't always follow logic.

I just feel like I've woken up and that giddiness hasn't gone away.  I check my email and there's progress on the next step and I squeal before I even read it. And then I start to prepare my response and it's like that fear of rejection, fear that you won't be heard, but it's also not a real fear.  It's something keeping me in check from getting wishy washy and not staying logical and practical.

Then at the same time it is a dream. An American dream.  A dream for grown-ups and families and independent ladies and determined men.

You wanna be set apart?
Burn all of your art
repair the wasteful part.

Labels: Arcade Fire, be positive, be present, be the good, dreams, I feel it everywhere even in my red hair, start anew

Thankfully my surgeon was able to keep my surgery as short as possible, didn't add any new screws, let me keep the screw, and the pain is a lot less than the first & second times.  Hopefully I can stop taking the pain medicine in the next week!

I had a great conversation with my dental hygienist about the Forsyth Beekeepers Club last week and I am so excited to attend their meetings, get cozy with their personal library books, and attend classes and workshops to prepare for next year!

I also found a lady writers group which I'm hoping will bring a little spark back to my life and also help me to put my ideas back on paper.

Tomorrow my niece and nephew are coming over and I am going to do my best to pace my pain pills so that I'm at my best around them. This time I am going to try to have a decent amount of makeup on so that we can take decent family photos.

And I stand by what I said before.

Labels: I feel it everywhere even in my red hair