Getting to know you all a little better

[thesummerqueen]

I'm an admin assistant/office gopher by day, horticulture student by night. I love plants. I had a large enough garden going at the house I currently rent a room from, but school and work have forced me to put it down for the time being. It had 10 rose bushes, a kitchen garden, and several perennials. I'm currently working on a sort of wiki for plants. I'd like to work in the sustainability movement in some capacity - particularly with urban farming/horticulture. Eventually, I want my own place where I can grow every sort of herb that strikes my fancy, a gated poison garden, and a bigger kitchen garden and a sun room for starting seedlings.

I cook (pretty damn well for not being trained), I sew (cross-stitch and clothing and I'm learning embroidery), I'm trying to reteach myself piano. I love food and artsy fartsy things. I used to do watercolors, but have lately turned to photography (which might end up making me pick watercolors back up again, oddly enough). I put what I consider my best stuff up here: http://500px.com/thesummerqueen

I read...a lot. Especially now that I've got this neat new Android phone with its Kindle app. I just finished this awesome, amazing, fantastic book called "The Poisoner's Handbook" that I recommend everyone go read.

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is wonderful 6 days out of the week, and then on the 7th I can't decide whether to move, scream, kill people, or whip out my phone and take endless "People of Wal-Mart" type videos without actually having to be in Wal-Mart. I used to live outside of Washington, DC, so the climate change (weather-wise and Bible-wise) has been...interesting...to adjust to. It's a beautiful state, though, and Charlotte is a beautiful city.

I just started "going steady" with a guy. Me - the serial non-committal woman (it's been five years since I was last monogamous). He's a photographer as well (that's how we "met") - he manages a portrait studio and does weddings and the like and graphic/logo design on the side, and is obsessed with regular and computer science. And he loves vintage things, just like me. We fit together like the best pair of old shoes, and I think that's just neat. My current tickle about him is how we'll talk about the strangest shit before we go to sleep - like how shrunken heads get made, or why people believe conspiracy theories, or who our favorite physicist is. In 2 months he's made me happier than I've been in the last 12 put together. Yes, he's an atheist - and a pretty staunch one at that. And yes, he thinks plants are cool (though he doesn't know dick-all about them) and spends most of our forest walks asking me all sorts of questions and letting me tell him all the stories of the green things.

I have a small and neurotic family of Polish-Austrian-British-German Jew, and Romanian immigrants from around the turn of the century, and I've recently inherited an entire box full of photographs from the Romanian side from WWII that I've been trying to get scanned in and edited. Some of my family still speaks Romanian or Yiddish. Over half of them are fucking nuts. They tend to be very long-lived, so it's a good long life of crazy.

I keep tabs on the Skeptic community and work with the local atheist group in various ways. A friend and I are trying to get a localized blog devoted to Charlotte doings up and running. I suspect I'm becoming a socialist and I consider myself a humanist even though most days I hate people. I love pin-up culture, I love make-up and girly things, and then I like turning around and getting muddy while four-wheeling and playing rough with the boys.

What else? Favorite colors: red and black. Favorite foods: Thai and Italian. Favorite Poets: TS Eliot and Walt Whitman. I think that's enough of a run down, lol.