It’s hard to decide how to start telling about all the stuff that’s been happening lately that’s kept me from blogging. I really do have hardly any time that’s not filled, but when I want to explain what’s been going on, it sounds at first to be pretty shockingly lame. I’ve been hanging around with people, and I’ve been doing errands. But the thing is, the people are so great, and the errands are so interesting.

The house I’m living in is called Sprout House, and it’s a fairly new place, started up last October. We’ve just had a bit of a memership upheaval, which I was a part of, where two of the eight people living here were replaced. So we’ve been figuring out a lot of things, which boil down to who we are as a group. What are we united by and what do we want to achieve? To that end we’ve been getting together whenever we can wrangle all the people into one time slot, always a tricky proposition, and having long, intense talks about things like Our Goals and Our Mission. We’re still working on coming up with a way to describe what we want to do, but we do have a list of qualities we’re in favor of and thoughts on how to manifest them. If that all sounds boring and even corporate, you should know that we accomplished it by way of lots of house dinners and potluck parties and such.

The people I’ve been hanging around with most are the people at Sprout House, so I guess I could mention who a few of them are. For example, there’s Sucharit, who lives in the room next to mine, and leads yoga sessions here and at the university. He has a harmonium that he sometimes pulls out to play Indian melodies full of unexpected chords and opportunities for quarter-tone singing, chanting along with them his mantra Baba nam kevalam. There’s Matt, in the next room over, who (as I mentioned last post) blows glass; he makes what he calls terrariums, ornate globes with room inside for some living moss and a little life scene with perhaps a tiny plastic penguin. Maddy lives upstairs and worked on a farm for three years, and as such she’s taken charge of getting the house’s garden working. All the work she’s put in means that we have a giant garden next to the house with vegetables constantly growing and available for house dinners and just whenever. Brian lives upstairs too and is actually only subletting for a month or so, but is enthusiastic about a lot of the same things I am, so together we’ve gotten going a big old batch of kimchi and an even bigger batch of sauerkraut, and we’ve talked about life and food and other stuff. Urmila mostly hangs out in the basement and has a YouTube channel where she makes whatever someone wants to know how to make (in the video I linked, you can see her making a spice cabinet in our kitchen, and whispering at the end of the video because she filmed it at about two in the morning). I could name everyone in the house, but it would get tiresome and I’m sure they’ll all crop up in blogs eventually.

Besides them, though, I’ve been ——

Alright, I was going to finish this blog, but I keep getting interrupted by life just happening at light speed. Everyone’s getting impatient, so I’ll call this Part 1, and I’ll come back with Part 2 as soon as I can. It should be longer, because there’s way more to talk about than just my housemates.