No Town for Fixies.

I have already burned through my pie and fried chicken reserves, and it isn't even August. Oh, the lovely mountains, wreathed in mist and viny things and blackberry brambles, zigzagged with bike lane-less hairpin-ridden roads that defy my bike's lowest gears. My ass grows firmer than I ever wanted it to be. No, wait... that's just a solid lump of cramp.

It rains almost daily. Every locale seems to have its own shocks to adjust to. In south Texas, it's the heat. In Denver, the cold and general desiccation. In Prague, the Czechs. Here, it is decidedly rain. I have never seen so much rain. I have never seen a lamb's-quarter, the tiny, ankle-high sprouts we picked in Denver for salad, twice my height, nor daisies as big around as my hand with the fingers stretched out, nor a whole field of blackberries growing wild without any encouragement at all, and so densely that no one will ever get to the berries in the middle but the birds. I like it. I am awe-struck. Still, it took me two Denver winters to internalize the relatively simple concept of LAYERING. Who knows what the equivalent to that is here. Rubber boots? Ponchos?

Today I started at the letterpress shop, first packing orders, which was more entertaining than might be imagined since I got to read all the cards for the first time. Later my job was to assemble these very interesting tripartite folding book covers from a single large, letterpressed sheet of heavy cardstock. BBH is in charge of publishing this interactive literary text, and my own hands made the covers! Which was extremely novel the first, oh, two hours, and still fun the next two, but a tad exhausting beyond that. The big machines were clanking and whizzing behind me, and I couldn't resist the occasional open-mouthed observation; soon I'll get to do that.

I guess it is necessary to say that I will not be doing the permaculture internship after all. Common sense does indeed catch up with even the silliest of us. I was getting pretty frantic about the situation, and something had to give. I decided I wanted to put my energy into what I came here for, to learn letterpressing. The perma-boss was pissed at me, reasonably so, but she was almost laughably passive-aggressive about it, accusing me of deceiving her in the most cryptic, roundabout way imaginable. I had not deceived her. I had merely neglected to create an honest budget for myself until that time. I felt bad, because she genuinely wanted me to work with them, and offered a half-time internship, but I had to tell her like my granddad told it: "That's quite an offer. But lack of money knocks a lot of good deals in the head." So she tersely wished me a good day and we parted ways.

My old Betsies will be glad to hear that I have come to live with a collective in an old, quiet, stone house with a big, jungle yard (surely the opposite of our doomed Betsy yard), and peopled with the kindest folks. The uniqueness of people is always so surprising. One could never have guessed them, dreamed them up, or prepared for them. In this new house, I'm wishing I had the talent of making friends in a flash. But, alas, I am a social tortoise, so I will continue as best I can, hope for the forbearance of my new housemates, and remember the good times with the old ones.