Purlewe!

Still not as online as I'd like to be, but here are some easy things to share. First, tendrils!

I planted some seeds from a passion fruit and got some seedlings, and I noticed the other day that they'd started sending out tendrils. Here one tendril is reaching round a ginger leaf:



I broke off a dried asparagus fern skeleton from the outside garden and brought that in for the passion fruit to climb on instead:



And then I thought everyone could enjoy "Nope," demonstrated both by enlarged emoji and by Little Springtime. It was in my old hometown's public library for a display of picture books about saying no to stuff.



Now the verbal images. I was at R's place because I was going to take her and her kids to get green card photos, and I'd taken off my boots in the apartment. The boots are tall--they go to my knees. Her younger son looked at them standing by the door and said, "They're like military boots," and demonstrated marching. Which, wow. You compare a thing to things you're familiar with. I've been told the refugee camp these guys were in was close to active fighting.

And this last isn't so much an image as a metaphysical something-something. Or a failure of Google Translate. Or both. At a different point in the day, R and I were waiting in my car for her kids to get off the bus, and she typed a question into Google translate. I could see the English words change and rearrange themselves as she rephrased and added to the Tigrinya. The final result was:

How do I know what I don't know?

I wrote back, That's a very big question!

I think, based on her efforts to narrow down what she was asking, that she wanted to know about cars, about eventually getting a car, but the 10,000-foot-level question was a great one.

I don't like to go longer than a week without posting, but I just did! So this is me waving hello. The reason for the absence is family stuff: my dad is finally moving somewhat closer to me (and very close to my younger brother), plus the Tall One has also been moving. Stressful and time consuming.

Thanksgiving included a clogged main pipe out of my dad's (soon to be former) house, where we'd gathered for the day. This necessitated an emergency plumber! Plus there were some shenanigans with the turkey roaster that delayed the turkey. "It's our toilet-less, turkey-less Thanksgiving," joked Little Springtime. But in the end the emergency plumber fixed the clog and the turkey finished cooking, and people's spirits remained relatively high, so it can be categorized as a Fun Tale of Obstacles Overcome rather than A Horrible Time. (It became that once we knew a plumber was coming. Hero of the story: the plumber.)

Wakanomori brought an Edo-period board game that he'd put together from images available online, and we played it. It's Genji Monogatari-themed: you march around the board and land on different chapters from the Tale of Genji, and each square comes with a poem--not from the Tale of Genji but from the makers of the game. Plus gorgeous ink paintings. Very aesthetic and allowed for a good review of the happenings of the story--or introduction to them, for several people present. (Not sure if anyone's read it from beginning to end. Maybe Wakanomori has.)