Although I had been trying to persuade some of my budding plants to bloom for Easter, just so I would have some flowers on the table and something besides phlox to welcome my guests on the pathway, the disobliging flowers refused. I had plenty of phlox in bloom, but otherwise a mere puny few pink flowers.

The day after Easter, the irises bloomed, presumably whispering to one another what a lucky escape they had had, not ending up in a vase. And the columbines also bloomed. These are the small, shy woodland columbines, though, so I guess I forgive them. They are like the pinks and the lamastrium, the backup singers of the garden.

It is the salvia, the 5-foot tall bright yellow columbines, the hollyhocks and centaurea, the snapdragons and hostas and hydrangeas that make a show in this garden. I wasn’t expecting any of them to show up in April. But I still think it was a bit spiteful for these guys to bloom one day after I wanted some early color.

Last night I got some knitting time at last, and I am getting close to the point where I was when I frogged it (“it” being M’s Jasmine sweater). Xanga will not allow me to show you a picture, for some reason, so you will have to take my word for it that it looks better than the first time around. I will try again later.

One of the things that #2 daughter and I were talking about while waiting for the bus on Sunday was Holland Codes. Richard Bolles, author of many variations on What Color is Your Parachute, introduces these in the form of a party.

You arrive at a party and find that people have sorted themselves into groups according to this classification model. You pick the group you would most like to hang out with. After 15 minutes they all leave, so you move on to your next preferred group. After 15 minutes, they all leave. Fighting down your feelings of paranoia, you move on to another group. The initial letters of the three groups give you your Holland Code. #2 daughter is an ACE, and I am an AIS, so I guess we are both aces. Here, among other places, you can find a list of the careers that will fit you according to your Holland Code.

Mine, even if I am willing to shuffle my letters around, are all things like teaching and writing which I already know about and do. It would perhaps have been more fun if I had discovered that I was suited to something I had never thought of doing — being a zookeeper or a mining engineer or something — but it is probably a good sign overall that I am already doing what I would expect to enjoy doing.

This book is a very good one for high school and college students who are thinking “whither?” Other books of Bolles’s are good for people in other stages of life who are still thinking “whither?”

And, since I am doing an entirely disjointed post this morning, I will also mention that today is the first anniversary of my completion of the Overcoming Agoraphobia program. I have to say that I still suffer a lot when I have to drive on scary roads, and I get prickly when I have a lot of appointments in a week (like, more than one). However, I can go anywhere I want. I make appointments, even if I don’t like it. I nearly always answer my phone. I make it all the way through my grocery list almost every week, and actually own a reasonable amount of clothing — well, okay, that one probably isn’t true. But I have improved a lot in that area, and actually bought clothing in a store on my own once this year. Okay, it was a bathrobe at Target picked up while waiting for a prescription, so that probably doesn’t count as shopping.

Ahem. I may not be much of a shopper or much of a driver, but I am better than I was before. And, since people with agoraphobia usually get worse over time, I really should think not in terms of how much closer I am to being absolutely normal, but (as with my weight and lipids profile) in terms of how much better I am than I would have been, had I not made those efforts.

Okay, I think I am now through rambling. Anyone who read this far, I salute you!