Rock & Roll Farm

Monday! May 10 2004 // 11:20 am //

Project South St. // final

Sunday: finished the living room/dining room, and it looks incredible. Blue and orange curtains, hanging paper lanterns with lights that JD made (I’m still amazed) and an orange futon cover. We decided one of the walls still needs something, but that didn’t get taken care of before I left. I’m sure he can figure that one out if it continues to bother him. For dinner I made panzanella and a small avocado/dried cranberry/chicken salad.

Monday: The kitchen is something approaching 6x6 and has no window. I removed all the cupboard doors, washed the walls and shelves, and organized the dishes and food in a more efficient way. It looks a lot bigger in there with the cupboard doors removed, and it’s a going to be a lot easier to work in there without having doors hit you in the back of the head every time you turn around.

Monday night: German-speaking night. M, D (JD’s brother) and his girlfriend C came by. Usually it’s just the guys, and they speak only German for the entire night but they decided it wasn’t working because they felt bad about C and me not being able to participate. I made dinner - portabello, roasted red pepper and feta angel hair, and another avocado/dried cranberry salad - after which C had to go to a work meeting so I did the dishes - slowly - so the guys would have an opportunity to do a little German speaking. When I finished I sat with them and listened, and was surprised at how well I could follow along without knowing a single German word. It helped that M is at a beginner level, so much of the conversations were teaching him new words or explaining concepts. It all happened in German, but charades are charades and I’m an intuitive cookie.

Tuesday: I finished a lot of the smaller projects I’d left in some of the rooms, and did some light cleaning of the office. I’d planned to move the office into the old closet, but the desk was just too big for me to move by myself. So now all of his papers and stuff are in the closet on the built-in shelves and his desk is still in the little room outside the kitchen. I think it will work this way until he can get the desk moved, though, because it didn’t seem like any of the stuff I put on the shelves was used regularly. For dinner we made Chilean Sea Bass (oh the guilt! the guilt!), steamed asparagus and garlic couscous.

That’s about it. I didn’t want to leave. I really enjoyed what I was doing, and JD’s company. I think I’ll write another post this weekend about the experience as a whole.

• variously noted:

The Long Meadow poetry by Vijay Seshadri

Philosophy Games [Via plep (and jpb a long time ago)]

Bush and the Lesser Evil [Via aldaily]

Porn and the novel [Via aldaily] semi-related: Obedience, fiction by Michelle Richmond