Cheap Dates

I did celebrate Earth Day by getting up at 6:20 and sitting on the back deck for an hour. :) It was a lovely peaceful morning, and ended up being a gorgeously beautiful day, a perfect celebration of life. For those of you who are interested, I will do a separate post of some of my nature observations from this weekend, but for now I want to tell you about the rest of my weekend.

On Friday night Paul and I went to the Brody Theater to see their improv show "Predicto-Vision." The group is directed by a guy that was in my faunal analysis class last quarter, so it was fun to finally go see one of their shows. It was a tiny little theater, and the crowd was small, but it was still a fun evening. The theme of the show is the vast possibility that the future holds -- they take suggestions from the audience as to what might come to pass in the distant future, and improvise with them. In the first half of the show the suggestions were: world peace, time travel, and Canada becomes a world superpower. In the second half: robots take over the world, people greet by bellydancing, and the color green heals everything. There were some pretty funny moments, like the "tickle test" to see if a foreign robot was really a robot or a human impostor (he was trying really hard not to be an impostor, but the tickling worked), and it was fun to go support a friend.

Saturday was the Farmer's Market (in the rain, which continued to persist for the remainder of the weekend), and then Paul and I took a trip to the hardware store. But not just any hardware store. This was Hippo Hardware, a fabulously cool store full of old used and antique furniture, lighting, doors, windows, bathtubs, library ladders, toilets, sinks, doorknobs, and all manner of miscellaneous knicknacks and bric-a-brac that is essential to a good hardware store. It was huge -- just kept going on and on, upstairs, downstairs, around in circles until you were back where you started. There were so many cool things to see, so many stories to make up about the houses that used to hold these things or the people that lived in them. We weren't there to buy anything, just to look around and marvel. Talk about a cheap date -- it was even in fareless square, so we didn't even have to pay bus fare to get there. :P

I also made buckwheat dandelion pancakes this weekend -- yummy! Basically, you pull dandelion heads, dip them in buckwheat pancake batter, and plop them on the griddle and cook them up just like regular pancakes. They're yummy, and delicious with maple syrup. :)

In other news, cross your fingers for me - I just turned in an application for a $1000 scholarship for next year. It's an anthropology undergraduate scholarship awarded on the basis of merit (transcripts), a letter of application, and two letters of recommendation. I'm confident with my letter and my transcripts, and I'm certain that one of my letters of recommendation is wonderful in every way, but I'm a little worried about the other. I kind of let a friend talk me into asking a teacher I didn't really want to ask, and it turns out my first instincts were not unfounded. I won't go into the whole story, but basically, I showed up this morning to ask if he had the letter (the application is due today), and he hadn't written it yet. Ugh. He promised to do it right then, and he did, because the secretary had it when I went in again two hours later, but I don't know how much effort he put into it and I'm not sure at all if it's a good letter or not. Oh well, I guess we'll see in a couple of weeks. It would be nice to win $1000. :)

That's all for now. More about nature observations later.