catching up with the… rudi

Okay, so I haven’t posted a lot in the past while.

Life’s busy – or so it seems.

Part of it is that I have a lot to say and just can’t fathom writing it all down.

Part of it is that the moment passes. C’est la vie, right?

But I do have some things to post – small recaps, all.

. . . . .

Last night, sprite and I volunteered at Filmfest DC, the local answer to Sundance and the Austin Film Festival. For the first time this year, most of the festival is taking place at a single theatre: the former Loews Wisconsin Avenue Cinemas, which have been closed since last fall. The place is a good shape, and is a perfect venue for the films.

However, the fact that the theatres aren’t in operation presents challenges. For example, there isn’t a full-time staff to run the box office, ticket taking and concessions. Also, as there wasn’t proper theatre management doing the show scheduling, the art of turnover – getting people out of movies without logjams – wasn’t really taken into account.

So our shifts ran from 5:15 to 11:30 – a bit longer than promised. And the directors of Filmfest, rather than chip in with the more mundane tasks, would lounge about, talking or giving occasional orders to the volunteers. Perhaps it was first-night jitters on the part of management, but it was a bit annoying.

Of course, what was entertaining was seeing the head of the DC Film Society scoff at being assigned an usher position for her volunteer gig. She decided not to volunteer then and there. I’d always gotten that impression from her, an air of smug superiority.

But I liked the other volunteers: a fun group, one and all.

. . . . .

We learned this week that our farm market milk supplier, Adam Cook, shut down his dairy and sold his cattle in the past fortnight. It’s extremely sad, as Adam is a great guy and sold wonderful milk and dairy products. He almost always sold out of all the milk he brought each week, and made no mention of the hardships his business faced. We’ll miss his milk (once you’ve tried fresh, non-homogenized, organic dairy milk, it’s really tough to have the bland, store-bought stuff), and we’ll miss his happy presence at the market. His brother, Eli, will still be there every week, but it won’t be the same.

. . . . .

After sleeping in this morning, sprite and I tended to our plot in the West End Garden. We cleared some weeds and urban detritus, and transplanted some african violets to create the eastern border of our plot (the violets flourish down here). sprite hoed the soil and mixed in some manure to get the soil ready for next week’s planting, while I planted marigolds on the north end of the plot to keep out beasties.

And we discovered a really cool thing: we have ramps in our plot! I made some ramp-infused pasta sauce tonight with a few of the ramps from the garden – yum! I’ll post some pictures to Flickr soon.