flowery

My sister is bored with stories about Rwanda and Sudan, and wants to hear about my life right now.

Amused.

I am not sure it's clear just how boring my life is right now. My days go as follows: get up, happy light, work, home, decide if I have time to go to the store/get some exercise, try to get to sleep in time to get 8 hours of sleep before the happy light must be turned on again. Repeat, interminably.

If I talk too much about the present, you will be begging for stories about more interesting places and times. 

The only interesting things happen at work, and I talk not about work. Work is off-limits, because I would like to keep a job. Oh, and occasionally I have a social life. But I am not anonymous enough here, despite having detached my name from this space, to write about such things. 

So, fine. A story about life. Present life.

Okay.

At lunch today, I went to buy flowers for a friend's birthday. Google informed me that there were several places within walking distance, so I stopped first at the one whose website looked the most locally-owned. I have an odd shyness about going into new stores or restaurants, and so I lurked in the entryway, looking at the tulips in buckets outside (white only; boring). When I finally went inside and explained what I wanted - cut flowers for a birthday; this is not hard - the clerk merely told me I could go look at the flowers in the buckets outside rather than offering to, I don't know, MAKE UP A BOUQUET. So I walked out, and kept walking. It wasn't so much a lack of service that drove me away, it was a lack of the friendliness necessary to overcome my slight new-store phobia. 

The second place was in a basement. And there were even fewer flowers visibly available. I walked out before the cashier finished with the prior customer.

The third place was one I see from the bus every day, but a little further away. It was crowded with color and smelled richly of plants. The woman behind the counter beamed at me when I came in, and the man in the back made up a bouquet for exactly the amount I wanted to spend, full of the limited number of colors I wanted. 

(I do not understand the urge to make a multi-colored bouquet in the depths of winter. There is a limited time for such things, and it is May and June. For the rest of the year, I prefer to limit my color palette. In this case, I stopped him at various pinks and a few blues - "No, not three colors plus white, three colors including white." I think he was disappointed, but nice about it - and I declined the Christmas greens. People with December birthdays have to share enough with Christmas. At least the birthday flowers should be clearly representative of something other than the holiday. He gave me palm fronds instead.)

The flowers are beautiful, and that flower shop is my new floral home in Gone West. Not that I buy flowers that often. Say, twice a year. But still. I am a new loyal customer, twice a year.