nor so wide as a church door

Somehow I have come to be in the Catholic Center choir. o.O

It's not even actually all that hugely convoluted a story; AT is Catholic, and I asked her if I might go to mass with her at some point, in pursuit of a ritual to write about for Human Cultures. She said yes, and added that I should come with her to choir, because they need people and I sing (not especially well, but reasonably on tune - and, bonus, audibly, as long as I am surrounded by other people who are also singing). So ... I did.

( I was a little nervous about it, for several reasons ... )

The mass was really interesting to watch. I've only really been to two kinds of services: Unitarian Universalist, with my dad, which I mostly went to for the brownies that came after the actual service was over, and which was ... pretty much nothing like a Roman Catholic mass, and Quaker, which was even less like a mass. A Quaker meeting is, like, an anti-mass, as far as level of organization and ritual goes. And one of the most interesting parts was how much of it my mother remembered as I was telling her about it on the phone today (it's her birthday, so I made sure to call). She went to Catholic school when she was younger, but has kind of lapsed since.

In conclusion: I think I'm going to stick with it. I hadn't realized how much I missed singing in a group, learning new music and practicing it and being taught to sing it well. \o/

So, Human Cultures this morning was AWESOME. I was expecting it to be at least decent, since I didn't get the professor that my suitemate last year hated, but it was even cooler than I could have hoped.

The professor was awesome; he did tend to ramble a little bit, but he was funny, and he has kind of an interesting outlook on what exactly it means to be an anthropologist. And then he showed us the fantastic and wonderful BabaKiueria, which I daresay I would not have understood nearly as well a year or two ago.

And then I had breakfast, by which I mean I bought an egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich from Alice's, and came back to the room to finish decorating my desk and unpack a few more things. I also took a really nice nap. :D

Tomorrow should be fun - I'm planning to go to Audiology in the morning even though I'm not actually registered for it so that I can maybe have a chance of squeezing into the class (which is already overfull, if the registration website is to be believed). \o/

Aaaaaand we have Dorothea! (Double reference: Middlemarch, and we may be calling her Dot, as in A Bug's Life, for short. DG is also a possibility.) She looks very, very similar to Clarissa, but the end of her beak is a lighter color. She's not yet fully poofed out, but she's working on it.

\o/!

OMG GUINEAS.

Well, okay, that's an overstatement - there is only one guinea, a lovely little two-day-early girl we have tentatively dubbed Abigail. She is brown and fluffy and her balance is terrible (I was briefly tempted to name her Bella, no lie). She also cheeps the cheep of the damned whenever I take my hand away from her, which means I'm typing this one-handed and have done nothing useful at all today.

Lucky for her she's so cute.

My mother has heard more peeping from inside the as-yet-unhatched eggs that are still incubating, so hopefully Abigail will have a sister or two out by tonight to keep her company; I am so not holding her all night, no matter how pitifully she cheeps.

... Probably.

So I was mowing the lawn, like you do, because my mother said I had to and also it looked and still looks like it's going to rain this afternoon, which meant I couldn't put it off much. It was cool enough that I didn't have to change into shorts, but I didn't want to sweat through my shirt if I could possibly help it, so I took it off, and stuck with just a sports bra - not my usual, but nice our house is surrounded by trees, nobody could see me and it really was pretty muggy, if not all that hot. And I was listening to music, which meant I ended up doing a kind of hybrid dancing-mowing-mouthing-the-words thing; very dorky, and always cause for me to be glad that most of the time nobody else is home when I mow the lawn.

Another thing on my list of tasks was to trim the kiwi - possibly I have mentioned this, I don't know, but we have a kiwi ... bush? IDEK, that started out as just a little thing next to the south side of the porch, and has now grown into an enormous monster that covers the entirety of the porch railing on the south and east sides, and has only been prevented from swallowing the north end of the porch, too, by some aggressive pruning. (There's another one across the lawn from the first that grew up the fence and ate it; it gets far less trimming, so it's sort of a mass of greenery with great long tendrils winding out into the air, searching for something else to strangle. I like to call that one Cthulhu.)

Anyway, I was taking the kiwi bits down to the compost, still with the music on, and that was ( when I noticed some blackberries that were pretty much ripe. Less a story than an attempt to preserve a set of moments in my memory. ) Then I climbed up the slope around the side of the patch and onto the driveway proper, and picked a few last handfuls, and then carried the cat and a bowl full of blackberries back up to the house, with my feet coming down on the beat and Regina Spektor in my ears.

So. Today has pretty much managed to get itself categorized as a good day.