mulberryshoots

After weeks of inertia, I finally found a way today to make some sense of the boxes of stuff in the plant room. Previously, I had been shuffling things from one end to the other because there wasn’t a good place to store things. Last week, I purchased some big plastic bins with snap on covers at Staples. Today, I stored all the CDs (and tapes!) into one, documents in another and slid them under the harpsichord where they don’t look great, but at least they’re out of the way.

I had been thinking for a long time to dig out one of the old 22 inch monitor screens that I had used for work and make up a writing workstation with a keyboard and mouse. Needing a cable adapter to hook up the monitor to my Macbook Pro, I ordered one at Amazon.com which arrived yesterday. I opened the package gingerly in case it didn’t fit, but lo and behold, it did! And it also had a six foot cable, not just the four inch one that would have been so easy to get instead. Then, G. kindly offered up the keyboard from his study desktop and found me the tiny mouse that I had used (and loved) while I was still slaving away at my clinical operations job a few years ago. He found another keyboard which finally worked on his computer after it was rebooted. (When in doubt, reboot, right?)

The orchid shelf needed tending so I washed it off and trimmed the plants, staging them in a way so that there was some work surface next to the early gateleg table I had decided to use for my writing table. A fat and happy Buddha found a place to sit next to the lamp. By this time, I was on a roll, so we put the old Bose system on a stand in back of the table and hooked it up. Soon, sounds of Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart Fantasies floated through the room. We beamed at each other in satisfaction for cobbling together old computer stuff that was lying around to make this new little space for me.

Golden floss from dross, as they say.

I marveled once again at the endurance the orchid blooms have demonstrated–they first flowered right after Christmas, and here it is now almost mid-June! Just amazing. And how fortunate we are to be able to make yet another place for ourselves in this beautiful old house. Lucky we are, indeed: we give thanks everyday.