Poem for Tuesday and Homestead Farm

Mirrors
By Tada Chimako
Translated by Jeffrey Angles

The mirror is always slightly taller than I
It laughs a moment after I laugh
Turning red as a boiled crab
I cut myself from the mirror with shears

-

When my lips draw close, the mirror clouds over
And I vanish behind my own sighs
Like an aristocrat hiding behind his crest
Or a gangster behind his tattoos

-

Oh traveler, go to Lacedaemon and say that in the mirror,
Graveyard of smiles, there is a single gravestone
Painted white, thick with makeup
Where the wind blows alone

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Due to a weather forecast that included rain and flash flood warnings, we did not go to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Festival on Labor Day as originally planned, but I still had a fairly nice day until about 8 p.m. when the app market on my phone started crashing every time it was launched and after hours of research, reinstalling, resetting everything under the sun, I am once again in the position of having to reset the damn thing to factory settings.

Advice to everyone considering an Android phone: BUY AN iPHONE. Yes, Apple is a greedy company with an obnoxious amount of proprietary software, but so is Google -- they won't tell users in which folder a little tiny corrupt 300k data file is located so that one screwed up file can be removed, because someone might then steal bits of the Android operating system like Google apparently stole from Apple. I am so incredibly pissed off and fed up and wishing I could just go back to T-Mobile and my Windows Mobile 6 phone which never screwed up like this.

Before this infuriating development, we had a nice morning -- we decided to go out before the rain to Homestead Farm for the first weekend of apple-picking, so we got into 's car (since the van was still in the shop needing nearly $900 of repairs to the hub assembly of the wheel, whatever that means) since we could all fit in there much more easily than the Corolla. We picked apples and peaches and visited the farm animals, then went to California Tortilla for lunch since Daniel had requested it -- he hasn't yet been to the one on Route 1 in College Park.


My kids visit the calf at Homestead Farm.


Despite the questionable weather, many families with children were visiting the farm...


...and feeding grass to the goats and sheep, who were trying to pretend that they hadn't been fed in days.


Adam made sure the apples were really ready for eating.


And Delta showed off a couple that she picked.


Only a couple of the many varieties grown at Homestead Farm were ready for picking...


...but we did get to pick peaches as well.


And speaking of adorable child-animal photos, we saw this scene in the farm store.

Daniel wanted to chill out and play video games in the afternoon while Adam was at cross country practice, so Delta and I watched last year's mediocre Jane Eyre and then The Accidental Husband since she hadn't seen it...a reasonably entertaining movie except that the central gimmick, that Uma Thurman might prefer an obnoxious Jeffrey Dean Morgan to a devoted Colin Firth, is utterly implausible unless Colin is gay. We drove Daniel back to College Park after dinner, where Maryland has just beaten Miami in their season opener, so that, at least, is good news.