Apart from Enfoiré’s health scare, August was an amazing month. August 22nd in particular was especially sublime. The weather was perfect that day. I went for a ride and felt strong as fuck: there’s a Strava segment that serves as my litmus test, and I beat my personal best time by 14 seconds! I got my second bike-matching manicure, and it turned out cute:
The day concluded with a good dinner, a hot shower, and a cannabev to guide me into a deep slumber. August is my favourite month. As an adjective, august means “majestic”, which is something I learned reading Les Misérables. More on that later.
The sunflower start Zoée gave me at the end of May has bloomed, and it is the happiest, shaggiest-looking flower I’ve ever seen. It’s about as tall as I am, putting the bloom at eye-level.
Next to it is this runt.
Alexa gave me the start late in the summer, and I think that’s as tall as it’ll get. I had to plant this one right behind a row of green bush beans. For half of its life, it was kept in sub-optimal conditions, but it persisted. The flower garden has not yielded enough blooms for a proper bouquet. I guess I got too optimistic in thinking I’d grow enough flowers to create a flower arrangement for myself AND friends. What I have planted, though, including the runt, has livened up the garden with some colour and insect pollinators.
I find joy in my Thursday morning walks to the neighbourhood farm stand for a fresh floral arrangement for the kitchen table. Today, thanks to Alexa, I also have a bouquet for my bedroom windowsill: she doesn’t only gift flowers to be placed in dirt.
She spent yesterday at the Saanich Fair, where there was a DIY bouquet stand. I didn’t know what she did at the fair apart from looking at massive pumpkins and getting sunburnt until I came into work this morning to find the flowers on my workbench.
I transported them home like this:
I rode home bow-legged, the inside of my thighs tickled by the accent of the greenery.
My seemingly enduring elation took a real hit last Thursday. I received an email from the dental office stating that New Tooth Day had been pushed back a week. The disappointment was palpable: I felt it in my gut. It’s only an extra week, but it’s been 15 months since I had a complete set of teeth. Although I was given a new flipper when the two other teeth were added, I felt more comfortable with dealing with my altered appearance than with the feeling of having a part of my mouth encased in plastic. I’ve done a decent job thus far pretending I don’t hate the way I look right now.
So that extra week wait? Truly tragic.
Now for the august novel that is Les Miséreables. Yes, I have spent an entire summer reading one of the longest, most depressing novels ever written. In print, the book is 1,700ish pages, and because I sometimes read for as little as 15 minutes before bedtime, I am still reading it. Victor Hugo uses the adjective “august” frequently (and not just relative to 1,700 pages’ worth of words) and, strangely enough, the adjective “indescribable” even though he often exhausted all possible adjectives in his descriptions. I know we need to take into consideration that the book has been translated into English from French. Still, here is an actual passage from the book:
“The veritable slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness.”
Whenever I hit bits of pretentious gibberish like this, I get this indescribable urge to give up and instead read some fast and easy trash. I don’t think one can argue that I chose the wrong time to start a book like Les Miséreables. I may dedicate less time to books during the summer, but it seems unwise to get locked into a book like that during the dreary months of the year.
The completionist in me wants to power through the last 170 or so pages before moving on to something more upbeat. The rationalist in me confesses, “You’re not a completionist”.
And that’s why I have not discussed my pants project in a while.
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