Sonja Foust

My yard makes me happy. Want to see my new front planter? Of course you do. This is the before:

An eyesore, I know. Pretty much just dirt. We’re pretty sure a crepe myrtle used to be in there, but it’s right in front of the door so, obviously, it had to come down. But that was all before we moved in, so it’s pure speculation. Anyway, we needed something that people could walk on because it’s right in front of the door and right next to the driveway, but also something that wasn’t just dirt. So here’s what we came up with:

I should have taken a picture when we first planted it. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Anyway, it’s an azalea with pink blossoms, but the blossoms have all turned brown now. It’s really a vast improvement.

These are my gardenias:

The smell is reallllllly nice. These are in the back yard and you can smell them almost all the way out to the street in the front yard. It’s like you’ve just gotten off a ship and are wandering around Tahiti or something. Well, if you close your eyes. But don’t keep them closed because you’ll probably step in dog poo.

We’re going to have blueberries this summer:

Aren’t you jealous?

Also (and I’m super excited about this!) My first hydrangea blooms have opened! They’re pink this year:

I am almost sure they were blue last year, although I can’t find a picture to back that up. I guess dumping that potting soil in the planter changed the pH enough to change the color.

And, as always, I need some help from my faithful readers, who know their gardens better than I know mine. I have a mystery shrub by my front door. At first I thought “really tiny orange tree” and then I thought “jasmine,” but now I’m pretty sure it’s neither one. Why? Because I sniffed the blossoms. They are definitely not jasmine and, if memory serves, they’re not orange either. (Besides, who would plant an orange tree in a tiny little planter by the front door?) Here’s a picture:

And here are the little blossoms:

(If it’s not big enough for you to see it properly, click on it and you’ll get the big version. That’s true for any of the pics on this post.)

So, any ideas? The blossoms do have a light fragrance, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Not terribly sweet. More like just a hint of tart. Can something smell tart? I don’t know.

Anyway, quit reading this and go play in your yard.

Technorati tags: Yard, Garden

Technorati tags: American Idol, Katharine McPhee

SPRING CONCERT - TOGETHER IN SONG

Chapel Hill Community Chorus
with Carolina Brass and Friends

Mack Wilberg: Jubilate Deo, from Tres Cantus Laudendi
Randall Thompson: A Feast of Praise
Stephen Paulus: An American Medley
Gwyneth Walker: How Can I Keep From Singing
John Work: This Little Light of Mine
William Dawson: Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit
Premiere performance of Gwyneth Walker’s: Together in Song
commissioned by the Chapel Hill Community Chorus

Friday, May 19, 2006
8:00 p.m.
Memorial Hall
UNC-Chapel Hill

Tickets may be purchased at the
Memorial Hall Box Office
beginning April 1, 2006: 919-843-3333
$12.00 Adults
$6.00 Students

Sorry to be so absent this week! Come to the concert if you want to.

That’s right, people, as of Friday night at 11:21 p.m. Eastern, I had written 19,500 words. That’s 78 pages. That’s over one quarter of my novel. It took me a week.

And now? I am exhausted. Let me tell you a story to illustrate exactly how exhausted. Have you ever fallen asleep in a public place? If you are under the age of 40, I’m guessing the answer is no. (Class in school doesn’t count. I swear they pump narcotics into lecture halls.) So, for me, the answer is definitely no. Well, ok, except for maybe once on a plane and maaaaybe once in Chem 21 my freshman year of college.

Anyway, on Thursday this week, I fell asleep in public. I take a yoga class at my gym on Thursdays. It’s pretty intense. We stretch hard, do our sun/moon salutations (this week it was moon since it’s a full moon on Saturday, in case you care), then we do inverted poses for a while (standing on our heads and that sort of thing), then we do ab work, and then at the end we do this lay-down-and-take-a-nap thing called Shivasana. The purpose is to draw all the energy you created during your yoga practice back into your body. You’re supposed to completely relax and clear your mind.

I am patently Not Good at relaxing and clearing my mind. So usually I just lay there and shiver for 15 minutes. Thursday started no differently. I heard the instructor say all the stuff about relaxing every muscle, and feeling yourself melting into the floor and all that, and I even heard her ding the little gong she dings at the end of the Shivasana to help bring everyone out of the meditation. I heard her tell everyone to wiggle their fingers and toes to wake themselves up. I’m pretty sure I wiggled my fingers and toes too.

Next thing I know, there’s movement around me and I open my eyes, and everyone is sitting up doing their namastes. (That’s the thing at the end where you press your hands together and bow to each other.) I’m the only schmuck still laying on the floor “meditating,” otherwise known as “fell the heck asleep.” How spiritual.

I told That Guy I Married about it later, hoping for some sympathy.

He laughed, then said, “I bet you snored. I bet everyone was laughing at you and you didn’t even know it.” He then proceded to giggle at me for a long few minutes before he moved on to something much more amusing, like maybe the sound of his own farts or something.

All that is to say that I am REALLY REALLY sleepy.

Man, writing is hard.

Technorati tags: Writing, Yoga, Shivasana

So the big problem with keeping a blog and averaging 10-15 pages a day on my current Work In Progress is that I am severely tempted to post excerpts on my blog. This is a bad idea for a number of reasons:

1. It’s a first draft. I mean reeeeally first. I mean like, I haven’t even spell-checked it yet. It still has all my passive verbs and adverbs and tell-not-shows and ambiguous un-tagged dialogue and general grammar problems. This is not the sort of writing that I want to present as demonstrative of my skill.

2. All that copyright stuff that I never quite understand. There’s some rule about not publishing your stuff on the web before you submit it to a real publisher. It’s all a little muddy, but the basic idea is that it’s patently Bad to post large chunks of manuscripts you’re trying to sell.

3. You all might think my excerpt is dumb and totally bash on my attempts at composing great works of literature and crush my poor delicate spirit, causing me to flush my manuscript down the toilet in frustration and cry. This is really the least of my worries, but I have to admit it’s out there. And I probably wouldn’t actually flush my manuscript, (a) because my toilet is not that strong (believe me, Robbie knows), and (b) because I never print my manuscripts until they’re ta-da done so that I can come at them with a red pen. Red pens are so much more satisfying than tracking changes in Word.

Anyway, all that’s a round-about way of saying that I am so drained and exhausted from working on my manuscript that I have nothing to say on my blog. My only idea is to post an excerpt from what I’ve written, and we all know that would turn out with me presenting a piece of crap on my website that an editor would surely see, and then refuse to buy based on (1) the fact that it’s already really been published on my website (despite the fact that my readership is a whopping 2 people), and (2) that it’s a piece of crap. And then said editor would leave a horrible comment on my post detailing why it’s crap and then I would print out the manuscript specifically to flush it, and then I’d break the plumbing. And no one wants the plumbing broken. So I won’t be posting an excerpt.

Technorati tags: Writing