better than - sex? girl scout cookies? sitting around the house, anyway

I love yard work. Love. We just spent two hours doing varous things - prepping the pea bed, removing leaf debris from the iris, trimming the hell out the The Bush That Grows Like Crazy (basically you cut it off at the knees so it looks like stumps, and by midsummer you have a 15 foot bush again - hello, coppice-ing!), carefully trimming The Other Bush I Don't Know What It Is so as not to remove more than 1/3 of the plant, but to take off the ridiculous long spikes at the top and at least get started thinning it out on the inside. I did a good job I think as it looks trimmed but not hideous. It was really hard to do because it's so overgrown I couldn't get at the inside very easily to take out branches. Still need to cut down all the extraneous small trees along the driveway with the lovely pruning saw and prune the camellia before July 4, after which Camellias Must Not Be Pruned. But since we now have a brush pile the size of a small car, maybe wait a little.

Later I'll sneak out and plant peas and some elderly spinach seeds I found (spinach always does badly, wrong pH, but why not plant the seeds on the off chance). Casper would be waaay too helpful I fear.

After mr. flea pooped out (he did most of the brush hauling and of course lacks my LOVE complusion) Casper ran aroud the yard in circles singing LA LA LA in her too-short dress, pink tights, and pink polka-dot gumboots. I want to raise a good outdoorsy girl. She really likes to help us do the yard work, but since most of it involves sharp objects or tools too big for her to handle with ease, she gets a little frustrated.

I have one clump of blooming daffodils, but they are in wide release elsewhere now. Today grey and rain forecast but 60.

By the way, unless you like sobbing like a baby, do not read the Modern Love column in tomorrow's NYT style section. Esepcially if you are a parent.

Machteld Mellink

Maybe two of the people on my friendslist will know who she was, but I just got an email that Machteld died on Friday, at 88, after several months of declining health. Watch the New York Times for an obituary, but I bet not until Monday at earliest. Machteld was one of the legendary women archaeologists of the 20th century, excavating at several major sites in Turkey, chairing the department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr, and serving as president of the Archaeological Institute of America. When I was an undergraduate she was a mysterious figure in a funny sort of fishing hat who occasionally appeared in the seminar rooms at night (she was already emerita, and in her later 70s). I didn't know her well myself, but she was a mentor to my good friend Amy B. and, of course, to several generations before us.

******

ION Casper has just fallen asleep on the study floor during a PBS special on Patsy Cline, after many hours of being turbo-toddler. Hee.