Today was Easter and it was a gloriously beautiful July day. This is the sort of thing where you know it’s wrong, it’s completely wrong, it’s a harbinger of doom if ever there was one, but also, fuck it, let’s day drink and dye eggs. How often, in the Pacific Northwest, does one get to sit outside in the blazing sunlight all day in early April? Not often, is the answer, and so that is what I did. I started my outdoor journey at 7:30 this morning at the beach with Harvey and then by noon I was just in time to catch the end of Four discovering her Easter basket in the shower. In an extreme pinterest moment, by the way, I ran several shades of green and some hot pink paper through the office shredder to create truly fabulous Easter grass for the basket. Highly recommend. Although it is my daughter who will have to deal with the fact that it’s now covering most surfaces in her house.

We dyed eggs on my daughters porch and drank canned margaritas. Then I went home for a bit, went back with all the ingredients for pasta primavera and my brother and the dog, and we had a lovely Easter dinner on the porch. We even said grace, which, um, we do not generally do, not being strictly Christian. I mean, my brother was properly raised Catholic and so was my daughter, more or less, or at least when she was with her dad’s family. My parents, however, broke with the church by the mid 60s. I’m culturally Irish Catholic but I was baptized and that was it. I have been making up my own religions ever since. I’m buddhist. Or wiccan. Or something like that. I was if not a child of hippies than at least the niece of hippies and somehow, hippie adjacent. I read Be Here Now and Siddhartha at a tender age and then in my teens I discovered Robert Anton Wilson and then the church of the Subgenius, but also Sybil Leek, so, you know, it’s a rocking late hippy mishmash in my head. I was a Quaker for a while in the 90s and that came close to sticking. But tonight grace felt right, so grace it was. And lets hope it works and the gods grant us some, because if I allow myself to think of it, between climate change and fascism and the stuff the orange creature was saying late last night, I am scared as hell.

I was, however, less depressed this week than last week although I did go get a shingles vaccine. There is a shingles outbreak in Clatsop County, or so I have heard, or so someone authoritatively said. Is this true? I have no idea. I personally know three people now who have had shingles, one of whom is my boss, so it behooved me to get myself over to Fred Meyer and get the first of two shots. I had chickenpox. I was 6 and I remember it vividly. I also had a broken arm, and I had chickenpox under the cast. We had a European nanny (yes, I do come from one of *those* families, but don’t worry, the money is long, long gone and all that remains are occasional bursts of etiquette) and she plopped us both (me and my younger brother, who was really small, less than two) into a baking soda bath and kept us there for hours every day. It was kind of fun. And my first grade class all wrote me get well soon cards that pretty much all mentioned chickens. So, bath, chickens, cast and fifty odd years later, I had to get a shingles shot on Wednesday evening.

That all seemed fine until about 36 hours later, when I was hit by an invisible mack truck. I was miserable from Friday morning until Sunday morning and truly, that sucked. I thought I was going to die until I did an internet search that included the magic word Reddit, thus discovering that I was not, actually, the only person who has had a bad delayed reaction to the first shingles shot. Reddit becoming a reliable source of truthful information was not actually on my 21st century bingo card but, here we are.

Anyway! To the photos! Sunday I was very depressed and decided to go get Mexican takeout because I could not face making dinner. Turns out that El Tapatio has a tiny tucked away bar and you can have a margarita while you wait for your takeout. I had no idea. On Monday I was at work all day and that is one of my work plants. Tuesday was another work and go home day with nothing to record except here is Mr. Binks being an orb in the clean household laundry. Wednesday, there was a rainbow on the way home from my shingles shot. Thursday, I took Harvey for a walk at our regular other side of the airport dike trail and had a brief chat with a very nice homeless couple. Then they walked on over the bridge with their groceries in a high piled cart and on the other side of the bridge was another homeless person with his stuff piled equally high going the opposite direction. It is getting like The Road already people and that was not, you know, meant to be an aspirational novel. Friday my favorite committee met at my favorite downtown bar and the bubble people were out in front. All hail the bubble people, they make life better. Then it was yesterday and the Fort Stevens historical park was full of elk. Also there was a complete asshole who refused to leash his dog but I am not going to go into details, although I am filled with righteous wrath and, fuck that dude: I feel sorry for his dog.

My dog, however, has it good and he clearly enjoyed his walk this morning.