Bertie Bott's Every-Flavor Ice Cream (Alphabet, Alliteration Style)

acerbic avocado angle
bucolic butter bites
cosmic caramel crash
dervish dandelion dangle
elusive effusive eggplant
frenetic finicky feeding *this is what it started with. It kind of went on a tangent from there...*
green grape gusto
hibernating horseradish hop
iridescent irresponsible icing
jicama juxtaposed jam
killer karma kumquat
linger longer lychee
moonpie melon madness
nefarious niggling nerfherder
opulent organic orange
pandering praline prickle
quizzical quirk quart
ruby radiant radish
stuffed strawberry scone
triumphant twitch toffee
unexceptional uphill upside-down-pineapple
vulnerable venerable vanilla
winged watermelon whale
yummy yellow-yam
Xanadu xanthum x-ray
zealous zinnia zest

Still Life of Fruit

Or, Summer in America (minus melons and berries*)

Courtesy of local farms, California, Australia, and Chile. And Bangladesh (if you count the glass).

*chances are I would have these, too, if I was buying groceries for more than one person, and/or had a larger appetite.

blink of an eye

Life can change in the blink of an eye. Think about all the things that happen in a blink:
1. a sneeze
2. light from a lightswitch
3. a beesting
4. accidents
5. reading words on the page to find out you have a horrible disease
6. realizing you're in love
7. a perfect baseball pitch
8. popping a balloon
9. burns (not sun)
10. recognizing an attractive person
11. getting your contact lens out of place
12. firing a sapphire bullet
13. cutting yourself
14. smelling fresh air
15. smiles (except slow ones)
16. turning off rap music
17. clicking to buy a plane ticket somewhere (to the ones I love, most preferably)
18. changing the channel on the tv
19. opening a new firefox tab
20. seeing "you've got mail"

just to name a few.

Sometimes blinks seem to last a lifetime, like slow motion bad movies. Sometimes blinks zip by. Some blinks you'll remember for the rest of your life, and some of those, you might never fully recover from. 

Blink. 

Blinkety blinkety blink blinky blinkini blinkykink blinky blink.

Stuffy-stuff-stuff

1. The days wherein having a convertible in Seattle is a good idea are probably < 30 in any given year.
2. If you're going to wear socks with your sandals, make them gold toe socks.
3. Needing a light jacket in August is weird,
4. Crabs are wonderful and various. And there are a lot of them in the Sound, judging by a 1/2 mile walk along the beach yesterday. (Of course, all the ones we saw were dead, but still.)
5. Being a good communicator is really hard. Communicating with known entities can still be hard...people change, and so your communication style has to adapt or die. This might sound gross, but someday I hope to perfect the cockroach communication style - it can survive anything, even nuclear war.
6. Cream is amazing.
7. I now know where the phrase "losing weight" comes from.
8. Strong cores are preferable to weak ones.
9. Laughing makes every day better.
10. Music can really change your mood. I was really tense at work for the last few days...on Tuesday, I was on my way home and heard a version of this song. If I hadn't heard it, and found it on the net, and played it nearly continuously, I would probably have gone crazy somewhere around Friday at 3 pm and maybe considered finding one of the windows that have the little circles on them that indicate you can smash them outward. I didn't know that before...that even though it doesn't look like the windows open at all, the ones with the circles have "one time opening" capabilities.

R&R...or Railroad Crossings

I miss the sound the train made at night when I was sitting on Emmy's porch, or even my own, for that matter. The long lonely whistle somehow managed to always seem forlorn-sounding...it was always saying, "I'm sad, come back" and never "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm almost there, wait for me." There was always a sad ache in my heart and sometimes I got goosebumps even though it was warm outside.

But the sound still reminds me of home. Reminds me of warm summer twilights and violin lessons and trips to the city. Counting the cars with my sister on road trips. Drivers ed classes..."every 90 minutes, a train accident happens." Which is why I have one of these on my keychain.

But now the yellow, which, by the way, is public domain as the Feds own it, doesn't remind me of railroads and the dangers of failing to come to a halt when the clanging of the bells and the cherry cough drop semaphore warned me to.
Now, double R's remind me of:
RR: rest & recuperation
RR: for Rosc and Ridj: two men I love (though in very different ways) that I have grieved for losing them within the last year
RR: ready to rumble
RR: the noise that K-lo can't make with her tongue in Spanish, so she always looks for a synonym so she doesn't have to try. (Example: instead of carro, she says automobil)
RR: a good ranch name. It could be Double-R, Rocking Ridgepole, Rambling Ranchhouse, Ruminating Ram, Ridiculous Rhymes etc.

I'm at a railroad crossing in my life. The train is coming. Will I stop and wait and count the cars? Will I rush for the track and get held up and wait impatiently? Will I become the victim of a railroad crash because I tried to squeeze past? Will I squeeze past successfully and listen to the wail and say "can't catch me?" Time will only tell. Here's to hoping that RRs continue to mean good things in my life.