dandelion - ella langley I couldn't find a song about milkweed (yet)

I thought I was supposed to have the girls today. Twas planning on a slip and slide - this yard kind of can't do much yet besides have an above ground pool that would be too much for me to take care of by myself so no. The slide, I thought, it would be a decent substitute for the year. And I bought myself some pens too for the trip next week, inspired by Sunshine, maybe I'll want to draw the ferns that always hang on porch, or the hummingbirds that always come to the geraniums. The pens arrived this morning and I can already tell I don't like them because the colors are cartoonish not natural, and they have caps, which will inevitably mean that I step on a cap (#legos). But now I'll have time to return them, because by 6 A.M. my daughter was already pissed off and canceled the day before I had even woken up. With her living with 6 kids at all times, she's often pissed off before I wake up lol 🤷🏽‍♀️. I'm not bent out of shape about it, there is only one Yaya (me), I'll get them for some time inevitably.  

I've been thinking about trying a mural on my own. Maybe if it's not too hot out there, I'll take some charcoal to the side of the garage - I repainted it recently, so it's a blank canvas, as my mother would say. But it will probably be quickly too hot, it's like the surface of the sun back there. I'm gonna go mow some of it - that's my big plan - it's about two hours worth of planned activity, and I might not even do it lol. 

At the moment I'm lying in bed, drinking coffee, 

monster sized, just behind my fence, where no helpful neighbor can chop it down

writing this, Thinking Stuff. I do that a lot in the way life has currently turned out. 

Sunshine said she'd come over and help with yardwork. She might. For EVERYONE, not showing up fifty percent of the time is the new showing up. So in a way the world has met her where she's at since that's always how she's been. 

I took my own pictures of this, but I can't find them. There a murals all over Buffalo, but this one in particular I like a lot. I've grown the weed that blooms like that, pictured above. I don't know my neighbors in Vegas very well yet, but I know they watch me. In that way, it's a lot like Lewiston in the first year. Sometimes my garbage totes get taken in for me, or lawn mowed. They're friendly gestures, but also they'd like me to be a bit tidier. Deliberately planting weeds because the flowers are good for butterflies and murals is not the Vegas way. But here is where I plopped, so everyone will have to get used to it. Experience has taught me that the more Too Much I am, the quicker the acceptance of it will be. That's why I'd like to double down on my favorite weed and paint one about six feet tall on my garage. That will make it clear that I mean it, this way I am, I'm not just being sloppy. I'd like to be able to put up a free library in the front yard. Load it with "naturalized garden" books. And if I can figure out how to have a vegetable garden, I would put free seeds in there too. I've been reading about victory gardens, and that's kind of how that goes - a lot of sharing seeds and a lot of free help from bees and butterflies. This yard doesn't look anything like that. But the houses I buy never look like what they're going to except in my head. Kind of everything doesn't look like what it's going to except in my head - that doesn't always go as planned - usually it does not and requires revisions and adaptations. Revisions and adaptations are inherently creative acts. Even if they're whole-life sized.