No maps for these territories

My last entry, friends-locked, was about how a colleague of mine — not a direct coworker, but someone in my library system, who I just barely knew — died over the weekend. Her death was a shock to everyone, not least because she hasn’t even been working here a year; she started just a couple months before I did. Because of this it feels particularly tramautic; the idea of starting a new job and dying nine months later scares me, I guess. She was just middle-aged. Anyway, the official email went out yesterday, so I guess it’s really true; I was sort of half-hoping that the gossip I heard over the weekend was just that, gossip, and someone got the details wrong somewhere.
I didn’t know her well enough to properly give my condolences; but I do know her coworkers and I am sure that they are shocked and grieving, and I can send my condolences to them.

Also, I will not make any jokes in poor taste about how libraries KILL.
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Lovely, quiet weekend, which felt unproductive but I guess I really did get things done. Taxes, for one; they would have been done sooner except I a) lost one of my w-2s, and I had to wait on it to come in the mail; b) I forgot about having to file CA state taxes. I didn’t actually *owe* them anything; I just had to spent a couple hours filling out four forms to prove that. Argh, government.

I don’t mind taxes, in general; I’m rather good at them. There’s something about the sequential forms, the regularity of it, that I like. Despite my proclivities I am old-school and do them by hand, on paper forms. I like filling out the boxes. I realize this probably won’t always be an option but I am happy to use it while it lasts. I would have made a good accountant, despite my general incompetence with numbers.
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Yesterday I bought — but haven’t planted yet — strawberry plants. They will go in the ground along the edge of the bed I dug up. The plants are already blooming, so hopefully this means that they will actually make strawberries this year, and it’s not too hot for them already. This is a strange climate — they’re selling strawberries, tomato plants, squash plants and lettuce starts all at once. It doesn’t appear to matter what you plant, and when.

Planting strawberries is a little bit of a decision because they really take at least a year to get going. Do I want to stay here another year? I need to decide in the next couple of months, as my lease runs out in August, and there’s no way no how that I’m moving anywhere in August, considering the first two weeks of it or so I’ll be in Boston getting no sleep. I think my decision is that if I stay in Davis I absolutely want to stay in this house (if the landpeople will renew the lease, of course, and I see no good reason why they shouldn’t; I’ve paid on time, kept the yard up, etc.); it’s a total find and I doubt I’d get anything nicer. I could probably get something cheaper, which is a consideration, but what the hell — how many places would I be able to put strawberry plants in the front yard? The problem with this town is there are two types of housing: big family houses and crappy student apartments. I don’t really want either, so I feel lucky to have found this place, a near-perfect hybrid of the two.

Anyway, so if I stay another year, I can look forward to another full summer; get my garden going this year, and then get an early start on next spring. It would be nice to feel that settled, I think, even if it is in small-town California. I’m sure it won’t last, at any rate.