More drama about the trees

Okay, I've now cut down most of two trees and a large bush. To finish cutting down the two trees I either need a chain saw or an axe. I have access to a chain saw, but I'm afraid to use it, and I do not have the clothing made to protect myself from accidentally sawing through an arm or a leg, and I'm not sure that there is proper safety equipment for protecting fingers. So I think that the chain saw is out, and I should acquire a big axe. Or, at least, a normal sized axe, as opposed to the current small axe with the twelve inch handle.

I'm getting warnings that I should not be much safer with an axe, but I would feel safer. My plan is to first try to borrow one, but if that doesn't work by next week I will probably end up buying one.

But I'm not really that worried about those trees now. Most of the current hassles are about the little fruit trees I bought on eBay.

As I have mentioned earlier, I saw a five-in-one pear on eBay. After I won that bid, I also bought two Stella cherries and a five-in-one apple from the same seller, to make good use of the combined shipping discount. So I ended up spending about thirty-five dollars on the plants themselves, plus shipping, which then came to about fifty-two dollars.

The trees were all supposed to be dormant. They weren't. The cherries were dormant. The cherries were thin little twigs that arrived dormant and have now grown into healthy little plants. I think that they are to small to be of much help to me, and after next winter they may decide that Texas is not to their liking and not bloom and never have fruit. If they do fruit it will be years and years from now, as they are just too small, and not a season or two away from having fruit as in the plant description. But I really have no serious complaints about the cherries. For an extra five bucks and two dollar shipping, I thought that it was worth trying.

The other two trees were different. It's odd to get such different quality stuff from the same seller. Again, the trees were smaller than I expected. Not really smaller than described, but the smaller than I had pictures in my head from buying bare root trees in local stores. They were just thinner than I had imagined, and I wonder how you can have a healthy graft on something as small as the pear. The pear had leaves all up and down the plant, in about twelve places. It didn't look like I'd expected a five-in-one pear to look like. I wondered if I got a single variety pear by mistake. And plants that already have leaves usually don't like being sent in the mail, and they especially don't like it in May or June in Texas, it's just too hot. So the plant looked quite limp and sick. The apple looked a bit better, but it only had three sets of leaves at the top. Again, not the dormant plant described, and not what I expected a five-in-one apple tree to look like. And while the roots of the cherries were still moist, the apple and pear were maybe just a bit damp.

I gave all the plants water, and having almost no planting instructions (other than to plant with the burlap on), I kept the trees inside for three days, thinking that water and air-conditioning would help the plants recover, as I'd been instructed to do that with some other plants I'd bought from someone else.

In three days the cherries were starting to grow, and you could tell that they were in fact dormant trees instead of dead sticks. The apple looked about the same. The pear had lost leaves and the remaining leaves were turning black.

I suspected that in it's weakened condition the pear had caught fire blight. I wasn't sure if there was anything wrong with the apple, just that it wasn't thriving like the cherries. I put all four trees outside in part shade. I worried that it might be too hot for them, but I knew that other plants I've kept inside for more than three days suffer.

The cherries immediately improved and started to grow leaves. The pear turned even more black. The apple did not appear to change at all.

I gave up after a few days of this and complained to the seller. The seller said this was all normal, and that the leaves would grow back.

Another week went by, and the pear was totally leafless and black. The apple was starting to dry out. Again I sent a message to the seller, who again said this was normal and that the leaves would be replaced. If I would do a scratch test I'd be able to see that the plants were still alive.

Okay, the plants were still a bit green on the inside. But I still think that they are dying, and that if they don't actually die at least parts of the plants I wanted are probably dead. The rootstock might still be alive, it might grow more leaves at some point, but the leaves weren't going to grow back where they had been. The grafted parts were probably dead, and I'd never get five kinds of pears or five kinds of apples.

I sent another message to the seller, asking that I not be required to mail back dead plants for my refund. Proof of death could be provided with photographs. I just wanted my money back, and if I got it that day or the next day I'd still leave positive feedback. I thought if I worded it just right, that I'd get my money (except for the cherries, which were still small but healthy), and that would be the end of it. Otherwise I'd file a complaint.

Instead I got an offer of new plants. According to the seller, the new plants had been kept in a cooler and were just starting to have buds. And I would get them soon, possibly Tuesday.

Okay.

I did not get the plants Tuesday, and I did not get the plants Wednesday, but they did arrive Thursday. And they came in a big tube, and I imagined that they had sent me bigger plants to make up for the hassle.

The apple was about the same as the first one, only this one has four sets of leaves. Leaves. Not dormant, not just budding out, leaves.

The pear was just budding out, and it was a bit larger than the first pear, but it already had blight, right there in the tube. At least, I think it is fire blight, cause it's a pear. My husband thinks that it is freezer-burn, cause it's been in a cooler. Whatever it is, it's making the leaves black and curled up.

I sent the seller another message, and again the seller says this is normal. Trees just look like that when they start to bud out.

Well, that has not been my experience before. My experience is that if it looks like blight then it's probably blight.

Anyway, on my eBay account I noticed something about the deadline for dispute resolution being on the twenty-seventh. There's no way that I'd have healthy plants by then. I've thinking that I should complain, just to get an extension. So I started doing that, though I'm supposed to be checking little boxes, and the little boxes don't really fit my situation. I finally settle for "item not as described" as I think that is the main problem, that the seller didn't originally send dormant plants, and now it is just too late and too hot to have healthy plants sent in the mail. And I would never have started this whole thing if the ad wasn't for dormant plants.

Then there are more boxes, and a place to describe the problem in more detail, and at the end you are asked if you want a full refund, if you want a replacement item, or other. I check other, and write that I want a refund if the plants die.

To be on the safe side I send two complaints, one for the pear and one for the apple. And eBay says someone will contact me by July 2. And I figure that will be good, because that will give me another week to see if the plants are going to die, and then I can say for sure that I want a refund, or maybe they really will get better and I'll just keep them.

Except I guess that at least part of this process is automatic, and the seller says I can have a refund if I send the plants back by the June 28. Only now I have to send back four plants instead of two. And while I just found it annoying and an unnecessary expense to ship back dead plants, sending back live plants is a problem for me. This will probably kill the plants. I don't really like to kill plants.

On the other hand, if I pack them well enough and they don't die, I'm now thinking they'll probably be sold to someone else.

This sucks that I'm supposed to do this by the 28th. I was thinking that I'd complain and get an extension. From the 27th to the 28th isn't much of an extension.

But most of the time I think that mailing the plants back and getting some of my money would be better than keeping these two plants, as I can't imagine that either one would actually grow into five-in-one fruit trees, and one of them has fire blight or something that looks like fire blight.

I just feel bad.

Plant problems

My husband went out of town yesterday. I didn't go with him. It would have been nice, but I'm probably stuck here until further notice, because of the plants.

This week (and probably some of next week too) in particular I am stuck here because I'm waiting on another package of live plants. I worry even about going to the grocery store, that I'm going to be gone too long and I'll miss the package, and that extra time being in a box without enough water will damage or kill the plants. Being gone for two or three days is obviously out of the question.

And it's not like I really needed to go out of town, but originally it was just for the one day, and it would have been nice, just to get away for a bit.

And then some really annoying things happened.

He'd thought that he was going to a suburb of Oklahoma City. Suburbs of Oklahoma City were hit by tornadoes, so we wondered if the job would be cancelled. Turns out that the job wasn't where he thought it was, and he had to leave the day before. So we went to lunch, and he left right after that.

Turns out that we'd been to this place before, but I don't remember it. After a while, you forget a lot of places. But I guess when we were there before, we'd noticed a few things that we wanted to do if we were ever in the area again and had more time. Like, now would have been a good time, if I weren't stuck at home, mostly because of waiting on this package.

Well, he probably won't want to do any of that stuff without me, so he'll be coming home tomorrow.

And now about the battles with tree limbs.

Well, it would have been nice to finish up with the garden and such for the year. It just gets too hot, and I don't like to work on it much after April, and so I had planned to stop all of the major work the first week of May. And then the weather changed, so that it seemed very cool again, even though it wasn't raining as much as I had expected. So, I thought, as long as the weather permits, I should do more work.

After having tried a couple of times to cut down two trees growing too close to the back fence, the trees grew back at odd angles, and some branches grew through the fence and did some minor damage. That is one of the reasons I bought a reciprocating saw last year, so that I could cut the limbs that start growing too close to the fence. So I had some work to do just for that, and a few weeks ago I decided to get started on it.

I had tried the saw last year, but I didn't really use it much. It's not bad. I just have trouble with physical work in general, and after using tools I need a rest. My hands ache. I have to shake it off, literally. So after sawing off the small limbs that would have caused us trouble later, I gave the saw and myself a rest.

After going back into the house and putting the saw away, I noticed that my right hand was swelling up. I did not quite look like young Captain Kirk having an allergic reaction to a vaccination, but one hand was noticeably larger than the other for a bit. Odd. I don't remember having that reaction using the saw last year, but I didn't use it much last year.

Anyway, the problem went away, and I decided to try it again the next day. Again my hands and arms hurt, but more what I had expected, and I didn't notice that much swelling.

After getting done with what absolutely had to be done I cut down some dead branches. And after that went well, I decided to keep going and just cut down the whole tree. I was planning on doing that at some point anyway, so I might as well get started now. And then at a certain point, it does seem like a lot of work, but it's better to keep going that to stop and have half a tree.

So I've cut all the branches off of the first tree, leaving the main trunk, which is really going to be a lot of work with my little saw. But, it will have to be my little saw, or combination of the saw and a small axe, because I'm afraid of chain saws. Or else, I will just have to leave it the way it is, checking once in a while to remove new growth.

I tied up some of the smaller pieces for trash removal, and then I went on to cut down the second tree. This mostly went well, until the last of the main branches, which was too big to get in one cut, and also slightly leaning in the wrong direction, and would possibly get caught in power lines or phone lines or whatever they are.

It took a while, but I got a lot of the second tree cut down, until there was just the main branch left. And it was leaning slightly in the direction of a power line, or a phone line, or cable or something. Anyway, instead of making a straight cut, I made this sort of V cut pointing away from the direction I would rather the branch fell, thinking that if that works with trunks that are straight, maybe a really big V cut would still work on this branch that wasn't quite straight.

But after a lot of work making cuts on the branch, I figure out that my plan isn't going to work. So I'm thinking if I make an even bigger V and get some rope or something and pull in the direction I want the thing to fall, maybe that would work. I've cut almost halfway through, but it doesn't want to budge, so I go back in the house to look for the some rope and get my husband to help. He says he's about to take a shower and will help right after that.

I hear a noise.

I go back outside, and that branch that would budge earlier is now starting to lean over, and not in a good direction.

I yell for my husband to skip the shower.

My husband comes out and looks at the branch which is breaking and now leaning on the line of whatever it is. Other branches I cut did the same thing, but they were much smaller and came loose without too much trouble. This branch is heavy, even though I cut it far away from the rest of the tree, about level with my head. My husband climbs a bit of the tree to get a better look, and tells me to cut where the branch splits off into smaller branches.

Like, if I could have reached that high, I would have done that to start with.

So he's telling me to hand him the saw and he'll do it.

He's never used this saw at all, and just doesn't get how that's a bad idea. The thing shakes a lot, even with both your feet planted firmly on the ground. You can't use the thing at an odd angle while you're trying to balance on a tree.

If I had to do this over again, I would get the step ladder and stand on top of that while I had someone holding onto my legs and I would cut the smaller branches first. But at the time that looked like a silly thing to do and it would have taken a long time.

So I tell him to get off of the tree, and I'll just keep cutting the branch the way it is. Maybe he can stand under it and push it away as it falls?

So that's what we do, and it sort of works the way I pictured it in my head. Only when the branch comes loose it just seems to fall really fast, and I'm thinking, that was dumb, I just told my husband to stand under a falling tree. But he says he isn't hurt, and the branch is free and we get it off of the line pretty quick.

So I didn't quite get that last one right, and into the lines it went, but nothing broke, and I can't tell that anything is wrong because of it. I don't know what the line is for, but the power is still on, the phone still works, and the Internet still works. After getting the branches off of the lines, that one line hangs very low. It might cause me problems later.

Working on another outdoor project now. Since I don't have money for a storage shed, but I do have this cement slab where one used to be, I built this thing to hold up an 8x4 piece of plastic lattice. To one side of that is a fence that used to have plants that blocked view, behind it is the original wall of the house, and to the other side a bit farther away is a wall to the added on room of the house. So the junk on the slab used to mostly be blocked from view, because of the vines on the fence, which aren't thick enough now for that. So I'm building another thing to which I will add lattice next week when I get more money. So that's what I was building today. Forgot about the low line, didn't see it, and while hammering some boards together got caught on it. Again, didn't seem to do any damage to anything, and the power is still on, phone still works, etc....

Anyway, when I get that done, the junk will be mostly blocked from view except on one side, and you can only see that from a certain angle if you are in my yard or my next door neighbor's yard, or in the alley just behind them. In other words, after I put the lattice up and put all the junk back on the cement slab, most people won't see the majority of the junk unless they are out looking for it.

And I suppose that I could spend another thirty or forty dollars and build a third wall. But that is not planned for now.

Anyway, the backyard is full of branches, as I have now cut down most of two trees. My hands hurt from using the saw, so I am mostly resting now. But I will have to cut the branches into smaller pieces, and then I will put them out a little at a time for the trash collection. I would rather do something else, as it seems a waste, but I haven't had any better ideas. I would think that some people who do ren faires would maybe like walking sticks or wizard staffs, but I don't have any way of getting the branches to them, and I can't have an open invitation for them to come here either. So I think that it will be a month or so of slowly getting rid of these branches by putting a few at a time out for regular trash collection.

Glad most of the hard part is over.

Still can't do anything interesting. I'm still waiting on that package of live plants.

Hail

And hell, and all of that too.

It did finally start raining, instead of being just cloudy and dark. And we watched the weather reports a bit before watching other things and then going to sleep. I had to take few pills before nodding off, and then there was this noise. And I can't quite identify the noise, as it isn't something I'm used to hearing. It wasn't quite rain, though there was finally some of that, and most of it seemed to be coming from another room. It rather sounded like someone was tossing pebbles at an air-conditioner. And then it sounded like pebbles being tossed at the other air-conditioners as well. And then the roof, though that hasn't quite the same loud sound as something hitting the metal of the air-conditioners. And then as it slowly dawns on me what that noise is, it really started coming down and was loud. My husband woke up and turned on the television. Seems like that storm we watched on the news that was just going to miss us was the first of several, and we were in the middle of one of the others, in places having golf ball sized hail. I don't think that we got anything that big, but I could be wrong. I picked up two pieces that fell just by the front door. They were a bit more than pea sized, but not by much. There seemed to be a few slightly bigger pieces, but I didn't want to venture out to get them.

The noise died down and it went back to just raining, and we went back to sleep.

I haven't been out to inspect the garden damage, or to see if there's any real damage anywhere else, as it is still raining, and raining a lot at the moment. It's probably going to rain all day, so I might get a short look later, but probably won't get a good look at everything until tomorrow.

Gardening and other stuff

Note to self, yesterday was annoying, in spite of finding plenty of on sale chocolate still at Target.

Well, a while back I had a cough and was a bit sick for a little while, but nothing major. Still, the cough has not quite gone away, and it is starting to cause me some problems. So yesterday I had planned to dig a big hole in the ground in the front yard, cause I'm thinking that anything major done in the front yard is best done on the weekends, and hopefully finished on the same weekend, as this would prevent any complaints to the office from being noticed until after the work was done. But I got up yesterday and realized that I just wasn't up to it. So I drove off to run a few errands instead.

I have just this week found my missing debit card. Or rather, my husband just found it and gave it to me. The way I remember it is this: I noticed that the envelope had come in the mail, and perhaps I had even seen the card itself when the envelope was opened, but I never actually had the card in my possession, and I certainly never had it in my wallet or went out and bought anything with it. My husband would then complain whenever I would ask him to get money out of the ATM for me, as I should be able to do it myself, as he had given me a card. And I'm sure that he meant to give me a card, and I think maybe he even said something like the card came in the mail and it's on the desk, but he did not ever actually put the card in my hands, and I didn't have the card. So after months of this, he goes to the bank and says something like please give my wife a new card, and they say something like we can't give you a card for your wife (even though it is the same joint account that he already has a card for) your wife will have to come in and get it herself. And somehow this doesn't get done right away, as I would think that we would both have to go to the bank at the same time to do this, as it would speed things along if one of us had a card so that they didn't spend a lot of time looking for the information and so forth. And then before we went to do that he found the card stuck some odd place in the desk where I would never have looked for it or anything else.

So now that I had my debit card, I went to get clearance Easter candy and some sand and other things that I needed for the garden, and as long as I was at the Home Depot and have money I might as well buy a few more stepping stones. And I think that I should just do that whenever I happen to be out and have money, buy a few more stepping stones or a few more cinder blocks or whatever I feel up to dealing with at the time.

It is annoying that in the garden a.) I seem to be running out of usable space while at the same time b.) there still seems to be way too much grass to deal with. The cheapest way to totally cover up the grass is cement, which is a hassle. Stone or blocks are easier and usually look better to begin with, but then later grass grows through and or they look uneven. To prevent grass growing through and to make the ground nice and level, you are supposed to spread sand under and then put more sand on top so that it settles into the gaps between. But that makes it more expensive, and more work, and if you really want it to look nice you buy this really super expensive special sand that blocks water, which wouldn't be a good thing at all in a garden and around trees and such. So once in a great while I'll deal with the cement (when it's not right under a tree or someplace that needs water), but most of the time I'll probably be using blocks, and the cheapest blocks are the ones that are 4 x 8 inches, and not very attractive.

Anyway, I'm running out of space, sort of. There are raised beds that are not permanent, and in fact some still have plastic under them, which will not do at all. Of the permanent beds I have dug, one is 3 x 12 feet and currently has tomatoes, peppers, and squash (not yet producing anything). And it will also have cucumbers, but right now I'm having a problem with the trellis failing over and I've removed it until I can figure out how to prevent that. On one side of that bed is the asparagus. I'm always kicking myself for putting the asparagus there, right in the middle of the yard, as the asparagus plants are not that attractive and tend to fall over a bit, and I think that I need a fence around it. This year I lengthened the bed, because I found purple asparagus at Walmart. On one half of the new asparagus area all eight plants have emerged, but on the other half I only see three, and those three are very small and struggling. I had even worried that the whole package was dead, but then seeing three emerge I hoped it would all be okay. I haven't given up yet, and I'm thinking that the other side just didn't get a long enough soak before I planted them, so maybe a lot of water would help. Anyway, I haven't yet given up on the purple asparagus, I'm just saying that half of the new area is disappointing and might have to be finished next year, and might even have to be finished with regular green asparagus.

Anyway, with the new asparagus, the asparagus bed is now four feet wide and twelve feet long. On the other side of the asparagus bed is an herb bed. Last year it had some herbs and a lot of cucumbers, but the trellis there was old and part of it rusted and fell apart. After having to remove the trellis, there didn't seem to be any reason for the cucumbers to be there, so I added more herbs and one of the artichokes. Oregano has taken over much of that bed, and I'm hoping that it and the thyme will cover all the spaces between the piquin peppers and the artichoke and the other herbs. And just past the herb I have dug a space for a Navaho thornless blackberry. I have to dig a bit more for it to make that area twelve feet long to match the asparagus and the bed on the other side of the asparagus, but I plan to do that soon enough.

On the other side of the herb bed is the most recent permanent bed, and I guess that I will call this the short bed, as it is only about four feet by nine or ten feet. And while I suppose I could dig more and make this one a bit longer to match the others, I'm not planning to, as I want a wider walking space on that side, so that one doesn't have to make turns and noticeably walk around things getting from the front gate to the back gate. And then there's going to be room for a bed between that walking space and the fence, which this year will probably be a temporary bed with pumpkins. The short bed has popcorn, soybeans, spaghetti squash, another artichoke, a few peppers, and a few herbs, so nothing producing yet.

And that's about it for the vegetables. You might have noticed all the vegetables that I didn't mention, like lettuce, spinach, and other salad greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, radishes, beets, carrots, potatoes, regular corn, green beans, peas, melons, etc.... I don't seem to have room for those at the moment. I know that most people who garden have a little of all those things in half of the space I mentioned, but they probably don't have a quarter of that space taken up by asparagus, another quarter taken up by herbs, they tend to grow regular corn instead of popcorn, and they grow peas and some other kind of beans rather than soybeans, and they don't have near as many pepper plants as I do. So it isn't entirely a problem of space, just that I've done different things with it than most people.

I know I've made it sound like my backyard is about 15 or 20 x 12. It isn't, it's bigger than that, though off the top of my head I'm not sure how big it is. There are paths between the beds that are about two feet wide, and there's a bit of space closer to the house and there's space under trees and such. There are six more beds (four of them still need serious work), but these are smaller (three are 4 x4, two are about 3x5, and one is about 4x4) and mostly have flowers in them. There is room for one more 4x4, which will probably have herbs in it, and that's nearly all the room I have left that isn't either reserved for a fruit tree, or too close to the house or else in too much shade to be useful. And these areas either have grass growing in them now or else will have soon if I don't do something about it, and all the areas in between other areas also either have grass or need something to prevent grass. And in these areas I need to either a.) do a lot of work and/or b. ) spend money on cement or pebbles or blocks or sand or something.

So at the same time, my yard seems too big to deal with and too small to have the plants I want. When I am digging and weeding and buying blocks it seems too big, and when I'm planting and harvesting it seems too small.

It is cold today. Not really cold, but it feels cold, and it is cold for May (only a high of sixty something degrees) and it is cloudy and dark but not yet really raining, and it is windy. I turned on the heater in the car this morning, and I still feel cold most places other than the house because I'd put away most of my sweaters and can't easily get to the stuff I wish I had put on. Other than being cold it's been a pretty good day, as I found some pumpkin seeds I'd been looking for, had a nice lunch, and watched the Adjustment Bureau.

The weather sucks

It is nearly the end of March, and we've had point zero something of rain. That's for the whole month. Some of that was yesterday, making this the second driest March on record, instead of the driest, which it looked like it was going to be. It's just sort of cold and damp all week, and not much actual rain. Looking online, I thought that it was going to rain from eleven in the morning til hours after dark, but that isn't what happened at all. It just rained a tiny bit, a sprinkle here and there, and then after not much it would stop and then maybe sprinkle again later. So you would go inside and then come outside and see that things had gotten just a bit wet, but not enough to water the plants or anything like that. I suppose that there's a chance of a tiny bit more rain today, it isn't as likely as it was yesterday, so we probably won't get much, if we get any at all. The good news is that without rain to interrupt me, I got a new asparagus bed dug. The bad news is that I think it was too late for those particular plants, that the roots might have been to dry, or the weather too hot, or whatever. So I might have wasted ten bucks on the plants, in which case I'll have a bed already dug for trying again next year. I'm about to give up on waiting for rain and just give all the plants a really good soak with the hose. I haven't even taken the foam thing off of the faucet. I don't expect a frost in April, but you never can tell. And I'm thinking that's one of Murphy's laws or something, that after you get everything in the ground there will be a late freeze. Anyway, whenever I take the foam thing off we get some near record late freeze, so I tend to leave it on for a very long time. So it's going to be cold and yucky for another day or two. I've had enough of it. Cold and yucky when it comes with beneficial rain is one thing, but this is just a waste. But I suppose in a couple of days it will be dry enough to dig again. Might as well get started on where the fruit trees will go next year.

Note to self

Today was Pie Day. Get it? 3.14. Today was also the first day of asparagus. And I found some purple asparagus at Walmart, so I'm going to try to plant that, even though it is probably too late in the season to start doing that. My first attempt at grafting was a fail, but I think that I will try again next year, with something smaller.

My routine is screwed up

Okay, so I am home now, after having been away for most of three weeks. And I don't quite know what to do. I don't quite remember what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. I have to think about things that I used to just get up and do. But I haven't done them in three weeks, and I don't remember what needed to be done or where things are and such.

I've forgotten to water the plants. I was away all that time, and the rain mostly took care of them, and a neighbor watered a few things, so that when I got home some of the plants were rather sad looking, but very few were dead, and those dead ones were mostly either things that I expected to die or things that I just didn't care about anymore. The second thing that I did when I got home was water the plants. I gave them lots and lots of water. But then on Monday I totally forgot to get up and water the plants, and Tuesday I didn't remember until I was doing something else and could not stop to check on the plants. So now I'm sitting here remembering that I need to water the plants, and this is the time of day that I used to water the plants, only I can't water them right now because it is dark outside.

Why is it dark outside?

Okay, so I guess that it's just that time of year that it stays dark longer, and I just didn't notice that from the motel. But here, today, it is dark, and it is a surprise. So I'm just sitting here worrying about my plants and not able to do anything about it.

So I thought that I would sit here and try to be quiet, and do things like check my email and check a few other things. And I'm sitting here, and I forgot my email address. Well, one of them anyway. I don't use it much anymore, but I have to check it once in a while, and I have to know what it is to use some other things. And I'm sitting here, and I just couldn't remember. Not that I forgot my password, but I just couldn't remember the email itself. I couldn't remember where to go to check the email. I didn't remember if it was gmail or yahoo or hotmail or fastmail. It was hotmail, but I sat here for the longest time and just could not remember that.

For a moment, it was scary. My email address was totally gone from my head, and it wasn't going to come back. And here I had thought I'd left that particular address where anyone with half a brain could find it (never thinking that I would be the person looking), but it wasn't there. I don't remember moving it, it just seems to have been removed for me during some stupid update or something.

Okay, I have the email now. But that was really annoying.

I am painting my kitchen. It seems that I've been painting my kitchen for a couple of months now. Maybe not really that long, but I started a while back, and then I was gone for weeks, and now I'm back, and I'm still not finished painting the damned kitchen.

I could paint half of the house in a day, if the house were empty. But the house isn't empty. I've never before tried to paint with all of the stuff still here. Well, maybe that isn't true, but that was a very long time ago. And I've certainly never before tried to paint such a small kitchen with all of the appliances still in place.

I shouldn't be so obsessed with painting the kitchen, especially now. But I had been thinking that I should paint. Not a different color or anything, just it is time to paint over all those little marks that do not clean off, and in order to do that I need to paint everything so that I know everything is the same color white, and I need to know exactly what color white that is. And I was thinking that I should get started on it, since I'd already go to the trouble of moving a few things for the guys to repair the wall. And then once I got started I thought that I should not halfway do things, that if I'm going to do this I should really do this, and so I am moving everything and painting behind stuff and cleaning under stuff and cleaning over stuff.

Before I left, I had done some of the work. In the day and a half I was home between trips I did enough work so that I could put the stove back where it was supposed to be. Yesterday, I moved the refrigerator and cleaned under that and painted behind it and moved it back where it was. That is what is taking so long, that I have to move one thing at a time, clean, put tape on the floor and around cabinets and electrical stuff, paint, wait about four hours, paint again, wait a couple more hours, remove tape, and then move the thing back where it was.

And also I am afraid of being on a ladder when I'm the only one in the house, cause I really don't want to fall and be stuck like that the rest of the day. So any cleaning or painting that involves being on a ladder can only be done before my husband leaves for work or on his day off. So that is annoying and takes even more time.

So I have now painted most of two walls, and that took about five sections. Now I need to paint the wall with the sink and the washing machine. I'm not sure about moving a washing machine. It might be complicated, or I might have to unhook something. And I really shouldn't bother with it, except that a.) I will know I didn't do a proper job even if no one else notices, and b.) I really need to clean behind it. There's a smell in the kitchen, and that is the only place left that I haven't looked. So the area needs to be cleaned even if it doesn't really need to be painted, and I want it painted anyway.

So am I near completing this task? No. Today is the day of the thing that my mother insisted I be here for, even though now it seems that there won't be much for me to do, except that I need to feed mother's dog while she is out doing something. Except that she forgot to have a key made for me, so this might take a while. So I'm not sure that moving the washing machine is a good idea today, as it is right near the door, and it might get moved in such a way that it would prevent me from leaving the house for several hours, and I don't really know yet when I might be needed.

Well, it is less dark outside, so I guess that I will go out and look at the plants.

Thinking about traveling

I would like to find a Woodrow Wilson dime, buy a train ticket for something leaving from the third level, and end up in some alternate dimension where I spend some of my time here but live most of the summer in Pennsylvania. Not actually in Pittsburgh, but near there, so that I can visit Kennywood and Idlewild whenever I feel like going.

I don't know how this would have come about, with me spending summers in Pennsylvania. I can see other paths that I might have taken and ended up with a certain career or married to someone else, but I can't quite picture the path that leads to me being a snow bird. Other than a winning lottery ticket, I see no way of it happening now either.

Maybe there was a winning lottery ticket in the alternate dimension, I don't know.

Anyway, I do tend to spend a lot of time wishing I could get away somewhere. And because of my husband's job, there are often little opportunities to go someplace, just usually not anyplace that great, and even then I usually end up not going because of something going on here. And then of course in the summer I have to stay home and water the plants anyway.

And so I have wasted a lot of time here when I could have been someplace else, though not anyplace as far away as Pennsylvania. And I would not have done anything grand, not visited Kennywood or anything like that anyway. Mostly I would have stayed in a motel room watching cable and maybe knitting. So far the only things I have missed out on were swimming pools (and sometimes a hot tub), having lunch at a famous restaurant, visiting the Cadillac ranch, and a few odd small town museums. And I've had to miss those things, because I wanted to do something else here, or I wanted to watch while the termites were taken care of, or make sure that repairs were done, or I had some work to do.

I always have some work to do, it just doesn't always get done.

So my husband is going someplace for the third time in two months, and I haven't gone, because of this stuff and because I have to water the plants. Only now I've about given up on most of the plants, they either aren't doing what they are supposed to do, or they have been doing what they are supposed to do and are about to die now. The main things not done or dying are the pepper plants, and the luffa, and the sweet potatoes. All of those things are in containers. The sweet potatoes and the luffa are in very large containers, but the peppers could be moved, and I'm wondering if I moved the pepper plants to the fence if my neighbor might water them for me.

There's even the possibility that the other plants might be okay on their own next week, cause it is supposed to rain some of the time, though not as much as I would like.

So I could go out of town next week, though it is not to anyplace special, it would just be nice to get out of the house.

And then the week after that I would really like to go away. There's one place I've never been, to take a silly tour, and another place that I used to go to often but now I haven't been there in four or five years. Or at least, I can't remember being there for a while.

Unfortunately, the time we would get to go there would be a holiday weekend, and we try to avoid such places on holiday weekends. But right now we are thinking that we will go anyway, even with the crowds and the extra expenses. Cause that isn't very far away, but it is not in my husband's usual area, and they probably won't assign him to work there again soon. And it is very near a beach, and I haven't been to a beach in a long time.

So that is it. Nothing really interesting, just the possibility of going away for a bit. And I am thinking that I will go.

The end of the two weeks

Okay, my husband has been out of town a bit. First, it was two or three days here and there, and I couldn't go with him because a.) it's hot here and the plants need to be watered everyday except when it rains, and it doesn't rain much, and they still might need to be watered even on a day that it rains, b.) I knew that the exterminator was coming at some point, and I wanted to be here when he came to my place so that I could ask him some questions, and c.) I can't justify little get-aways when there is still so much work to do. And then sometimes he goes out of town for a whole week, which I just can't do at all when I have plants to look after, unless maybe it is very early in the spring and there is a lot of rain, or maybe in the fall when there's rain or just the plants don't need to be watered anymore. The main time that I would go out of town for a whole week would be after first freeze in the fall and before spring planting.

This is August. I usually don't go out of town for a whole week in August, unless maybe the plants have all died or I've just given up on them. And I certainly am ready to give up on a lot of them. I have seven squash plants, and I've yet to get even one squash. They are probably going to die now. I don't know why they didn't have any squash, since they had plenty of flowers, both male and female. I have yet to see any beans, though I'm seeing flowers there too. The popcorn seems to be producing, though maybe not as much as I would like, and it won't be time to harvest that for a while yet. The sweet potatoes seem to be doing fine, but I won't really know until I dig them up in the fall. The cucumbers were really going at it, but now seem to be taking a bit of a break. But I think that the cucumbers are sending out new vines and will get back to work soon. The chayote died when it was about four foot tall. Most of the tomatoes look dead, but they aren't, so they still might recover in the fall. One of the luffa vines has really taken over, while the second one is still quite small, and there are no flowers on either vine yet. I think that I planted the pumpkins too late and nothing will come from them, even if they don't die.

And that leaves the peppers, which are taking a break in the heat, but the plants look good so long as they are watered everyday, and I expect to get a lot from them in the fall if I can keep them alive a bit longer in the hundred degree heat.

So, I am not ready to abandon the plants, since several are still working at producing something. So no week long trips for me.

And, while my husband was out for a week, we found out he was scheduled to work another week in a place that was closer to where he was than here, and he only had the one day off, so he might as well drive to the next place for the next week instead of coming home.

So that was two weeks away. And I had plenty of work to do here, and I usually get more done while he's away, and I try to do all the other things that are best done while I have the place to myself for a bit. But after awhile, two weeks by yourself is two weeks by yourself. It seems a long time to be by yourself when you aren't used to it.

Okay, so he's home now, though probably not for long. Tomorrow, he has jury duty. If he doesn't get picked he'll work two days in Dallas and three days out of town. The three days he is out of town will be 103 degrees here, and no more rain expected (we got some Friday), so I won't be going with him. And then he'll come home for a day or two before heading out again, for a week, and I won't be going then either even though he would have liked for us to head out someplace new as long as he was already nearly out of the state. But I can't leave the plants, and my friends are having a party a week from Saturday.

A week after that, it will be nearly the end of August. Maybe in September we will get a lot of rain.

Rain lilies

I found a rain lily in my backyard. I didn't know that they bloomed in July. But this one did, probably because it has been raining off and on since Monday of last week. I don't have that many rain lilies myself, but when they start blooming there are usually quite a few in the field, so I'll have to go and take a look.

Other wildflower developments are not as good. Even before it started raining, I noticed a few sprouts, and they turned out to be bluebonnets. Bluebonnets are not supposed to sprout in June. I had bought a few bluebonnet transplants in the spring, not enough to make a nice display, but I thought that they would make seeds and that next spring bluebonnets would magically appear in the places I wanted them to be. To be on the safe side, I collected some of the seeds, and I planted some of the seeds, thinking that they would not be able to sprout until much later. But there they are.

So after looking on the web, I see that this does happen sometimes. Unfortunately, the early sprouted seeds don't usually produce plants that survive the summer. From what I have read, this is usually not a big deal, as there are usually plenty of seeds left to sprout later at the appropriate time. But I don't think so. I think that most of the seeds I planted sprouted, and I don't know if the ones I left to nature where planted or eaten or blown away. Of the sprouts I saw, there are three tiny plants remaining. They will get terribly hot once this rain stops.

Aside from the wonderful free water, I have the usual complaints about the garden. The rain cools things down a bit, so I could work in the mornings, except that I can't work in the actual mud like I have now. And it is going to rain for a bit more, and by the time it stops raining and the ground dries out enough for me to do any work, it will probably be a hundred degrees again and too hot to get much of anything done. In the middle of summer, there are no tomatoes or peppers to speak of, you just try and keep the plants alive and hope that you get some in the fall. The squash still have not produced a damned thing. There are bean plants, but no beans on them yet. The soybeans just refuse to sprout, and the bugs tend to get more of the other bean plants than I do. The popcorn is doing well, but it will still be months before I can harvest any of it. The sweet potatoes look okay, but again that is something that gets left alone until fall. There are pumpkin sprouts, but I think that I waited too long on those. I have two luffa plants, but one is still very small, while the other is just now starting to really take over the thing it was meant to grow on.

So, that leaves me cucumbers and herbs. To be honest, I don't really cook with the herbs much, I just like the way that they smell and the way that they look, and I like that many of them are perennial plants.

I might be going to Oklahoma for two or three days next week. I don't know. There's nothing really good to do there, and we aren't going to be close enough to Tulsa to stay at my favorite place, it would just be an excuse to get out of the house. I won't be able to go, because of the plants, unless it is still raining, and I can't really believe that it will go on that long. And of course, there's always something more useful that I should be doing. Not that I'll actually get it done, just that I should be doing it.

Good News and Bad News

The good news is that it is raining. The bad news is that it is raining.

So, my husband was off for the week, and he said something about there being work in some other district, but no one had offered it to him. And I said something like we should get ready to go in case they call and offer a trip someplace interesting. And he told me where he thought it might be if someone did call, and that didn't seem very interesting, and I couldn't leave the plants that long anyway. But I looked at the weather reports, hoping that it was going to rain or something so that I could go if they did call. Only about ten percent chance of rain, with no little clouds or lightening icons or anything like that.

I pretty much forgot about doing anything that would have allowed me to go on a trip, cause even if there was a trip I wouldn't go cause of the plants. I went back to slowly digging this hole that will be the future home of a fruit tree. Not a bad hole now, even if it did take a really long time for me to get this far. The kitchen is a total mess and the rest of the house is mostly just as bad, but I have a mostly dug out hole.

So Monday we were out doing something, and my husband said he needed to stop at Home Depot. And as long as we were at Home Depot, I thought that we might as well get four more of those blocks, and so I picked four that didn't look too bad and put them in the cart before we went off to look for screws and whatever else my husband was going to look at. And then one of the workers said something to us, like did we need help or whatever, and then there was the short conversation that you'd expect to have with someone at Home Depot when you don't need any help (or don't want to admit needing any help), and it somehow ending with him saying something like "Yes, but it's going to rain."

And I thought that was a weird thing to say, cause I knew that it wasn't going to rain, cause I had looked at the reports. Okay, I hadn't looked that day and maybe I hadn't seriously looked the day before, but I had really looked maybe the day before that and there was nothing really about rain, and it didn't look like rain outside when we were out. Outside was the awful heat that is usual around here, with maybe some clouds but not yet thick enough to be useful, much less really looking like rain.

So we went on with our business, but I made a mental note to look at the weather again, cause maybe it was supposed to rain later.

Anyway, while we were still in the Home Depot, it did start raining. By the time we found all of the right screws and such and looked at whatever else my husband needed to look at, it wasn't just raining it was really pouring. And he said something about not wanting to take my stuff out to the car in the rain, but I wasn't having that, cause there's this covered part where you can load stuff without getting wet, you just have to wait your turn.

So he ran out to get the car and I waited with the stuff, and he lined up with the other cars. But somehow that didn't seem to go in an orderly fashion, with the only way you moved up the line is if the person in front of you gave up and left. So my husband finally sees and opening and pulls up, but on the outside lane, where you still get wet on one side, and that was the side where there was space cleared for the blocks. And rather than push stuff over to the other side, he just got wet loading the blocks. And he seemed a bit mad about it, but he's the one who couldn't be bothered to move the stuff to the other side, so, whatever. But he didn't stay mad, and we went home.

So of course there's this serious downpour in the next town over where the Home Depot was, but not at home. At home it was quite dry. So we get all wet but our house doesn't get any rain, which means that my plants didn't get any rain. So that was a bit disappointing. Then I remembered having left the shovel and such outside, so I went to collect those, and then we checked our phone messages.

We'd missed a call from his work. They had a job for him, but there were no details. He called, but they'd already found someone else. I don't know if it was a week away someplace cool or just a day around here. Maybe we are better off not knowing anyway.

So that night it did rain here, which is good for the plants, but not good for me trying to finish digging that hole. I can dig after a light rain, but I can't dig in the mud after a lot of rain.

The next day, we got more rain. Anyway, we've had rain off and on, so the temperature has been mid-eighties instead of high nineties, so that's good, and once we even took advantage of the nice weather and went back to the arboretum, where we learned that you have to leave the park at five, not just that they stop letting people in at five. Oh, well. We still had a nice half hour walk.

So it's a bit sad that when I was thinking about it I didn't get ready for a trip and we weren't here to get that message, just in case, cause there has now been enough rain that I could have left for the week if I had wanted to. And that probably won't happen again for a long time.

During a break in the rain, a neighbor had a new driveway poured. I don't like her much, but I hope that the rain doesn't mess up the concrete.

Anyway, the rain is all good for the plants and everything, I just wish that it had waited till I'd finished digging out the hole. Some of it will have to be done over again now, and I'll have to wait til sometime next week before it is dry enough to do that.

One of my readers was saying how she wished she could see my garden. But there is nothing to look at. We did this video last year, and I'm afraid this is pretty much what the garden still looks like. It is more in the planning stage, still. And what work I was doing got interrupted by stupid stuff like being ordered to cut down my honeysuckle. So it looks even worse, cause there are no vines to obstruct a person's view, and no flowers to speak of. It is almost all vegetable plants, and I'm not getting much veggies now. Most of the popcorn plants look good, but I won't be getting the popcorn for a long time yet. For some reason, the squash just didn't work out. It is too hot for the tomatoes, but maybe I'll get a few later. I have a few peppers, but not as much as I'd like. The sweet potatoes look nice, but you don't eat them until they finish growing in fall or late summer. And there are no beans yet. The main thing that I'm getting now is the cucumbers. And I like cucumbers, but I just can't do that much with them when that's all I've got. I'm just trying to keep everything alive until the fall when I can collect the rest of the stuff.

Weeds and other ugly things

Okay, I am actually having to cut down all of my honeysuckle on my fence. This really sucks. This is a lot of work. I'm doing a lot of work to make something look ugly. I don't really enjoy doing this much work to make things pretty, and here I am being ordered to do something to make things ugly.

After pointing out that there was no such rule saying that we could not grow vines on our fences, I was told that it wasn't in the rule book but instead in the contract itself. There's a paragraph about cutting the grass and such, and it says not to allow trees to grow in the fence and not to have tall grass around the fence and not to allow vines to grow on or in the fence. So that looks to me I promised not to have weeds on the fence, not that I promised not to grow flowers. I don't think that anyone has ever claimed that it was meant to keep people from having honeysuckle and roses and such. If that was meant, people either stopped reading it that way, or a general exception to the rule was made for certain plants, or specific exceptions to the rule were made for certain people. Anyway, the honeysuckle was there on the fence when I paid to move in, and that was one of the reasons (small reason, but without the plants I liked I might not have taken the place) we picked this place over others. And the honeysuckle was there for decades before I had the place, and it has been there for more than five years since I've lived here, and suddenly now I'm being told that it has to go. Other people are not being told to remove their honeysuckle. Just some of us.

This is ordered by a board member who is currently acting manager. Unfortunately, this is one of the guys that I voted for last year. If the guy running against him had just sent out flyers, we might not have to deal with this guy. But that isn't what happened.

Another guy that we elected also turned out to be a mistake. He was actively trying to get a woman evicted. This woman has lived here more than twenty years, but she was asked to leave for reasons that make no sense to me. Apparently, the real reason that someone wanted her gone was so that her house would be vacant for friends of board members. But, you can't evict someone for that, you have to have something else going on, like not paying rent, and that wasn't it. She was "violating regulations." Everyone violates a regulation now and then, but you don't usually evict people for that.

Apparently, one of the violations was that she had someone living with her who wasn't immediate family. I've always thought that part of the rules was about not renting the house out for profit, not that you couldn't have roommates or have people stay at your house rather than leave it vacant for long periods of time. But technically, this is what I agreed to. Hopefully, the rule will change after we elect the almost evicted woman to the board.

So, I will vote for this woman, and my buddy B, and on his advice I also plan to vote for D, who added to the board several months ago after someone else resigned. There six other people running, at least one of them is a current board member, and at least one other is a former board member. But I don't know much about the others.

Anyway, the elections will be Saturday. In the past we have been able to vote on two or three days, so I am wondering about the change, and I hope that we don't lose people because of it being on a weekend. But at least there will not be this argument about whether or not the ballot box was put in the safe on nights between voting days.

Okay, it has been a few days since I started writing this, and a lot has happened. I got a letter warning me not to vote for my buddy B or either of the other two he advised me to vote for. Everyone in the place got one of these letters, including my buddy B and the other people we are warned about in the letter. In the letter, several people are lumped together as being bad guys conspiring against the rest of us, and while I'll agree with some of it, I find it hard to believe that most of the people mentioned in this letter even get along with each other, much less that they have banded together to do evil to the rest of us. Like, I don't think that the woman who was nearly evicted is planning anything with the guy who spoke to the judge about getting her evicted. And I don't think that my buddy B could be in on anything with the woman who requested that we all spy on each other and report people who have violated regulations, since my buddy B is the one who told me about that in the first place.

But I don't know, maybe my buddy B is just telling me what I want to hear and says something totally different to other people.

What I really want to know is how to get rid of M. I thought my buddy B was the one to do that (or at least make him tone it down a bit), but after hearing other people speak there are others running for the board who want him gone even more than I do. Now it sounds like the main person who wants M gone is someone who my buddy is always butting heads with.

Now, I am going to vote for three people, so I suppose that I could vote for this guy and my buddy and a third person, rather than cast all three votes for one side or the other.

There are still three other people running. One person used to be on the board, but I heard that he bought another house and will soon be leaving anyway. So I don't see why that person is running if he isn't going to be around for more than a couple of meetings. Of course, he could have bought a house that he doesn't actually plan to move to and could stay here, but I don't think so. So I think that a vote for that guy would be a totally wasted vote anyway. Another person running probably isn't really running anymore, as I've seen a sign in her yard telling people to vote for someone else. I don't like her. I wouldn't vote for her anyway. The third other person running is someone that I don't know at all. I just got a flyer from him yesterday that said he wasn't on either side, and that is a major reason that we should vote for him, that he would consider each issue on it's own and not just vote with one group or the other.

So I could vote for this guy who isn't on a side and my buddy and the guy that my buddy doesn't like. But somehow that doesn't seem like a good idea either.

Now I really don't know what to do. But I can't not vote, and I can't see not voting for my buddy. I'm just not sure now what to do about the other two votes.

Note to self

I just missed the plant sale at the botanical gardens. It was April 10th. Next March I need to remember to look into that.

Anyway, earlier this week we went to look at the irises and such, and that's how I knew that we had missed the sale, cause the signs for it were still up.

Not that I needed to buy any more plants. I think that I have just killed the last one that I bought, and another one is soon to follow.

It is four in the morning

This is one of those times when it would have been good if I had the place to myself. I don't feel well. Not that I'm that close to being actually sick, just not feeling well and sleep doesn't seem like an option now. If I were by myself I'd pop in a Star Trek DVD and watch TV in bed until I fell asleep again. But I'm not by myself, so I'm in here.

I have just left the world's longest comment on someone else's blog. The blog wouldn't let me publish anything that long, so I took out all the extra lines between points and then also deleted three paragraphs on points that weren't that important (I can always go back and add them later). I was trying to be helpful while I still remembered what I wanted to say.

Earlier I had a weird dream about someone who looked like an actor. I think his name is Colin Firth. Only this wasn't really that guy, this was someone who would look like that guy, if that guy weren't an actor and didn't have to diet and/or go to the gym to get his next paycheck.

Okay, it is later. I finally did get some sleep. The somewhat disturbing images of someone who looks like Colin Firth are fading. I can get on with my life now.

Only now it is raining. I should have known that it would be raining. I checked earlier in the week and found out that it would probably be raining on Easter, so I had planned to do a lot of work in the garden before then. And I figured to be on the safe side that I should plan on the rain coming in on Saturday rather than Sunday. So I was planning to do certain things on Friday, thinking that it would be best to plant things right before the rain and such. I mostly took the day off on Thursday, except for buying those last few plants. Only by that time the forecast had changed and the rain was predicted for Friday afternoon. Still plenty of time for me to get things done on Friday morning.

Well, that's what I thought. It was already starting to rain about twenty minutes after I went outside. And there was actually talk of hail, so instead of planting things I ended up bringing stuff inside if it wasn't already in the ground.

And so it is raining, and I'm just sort of waiting around to see when that might be over. While it is raining, it would not be a good time to do my scheduled errands, as that partially would have been to go to Home Depot and pick up some mulch. Not something to be done in the rain. I might skip that part for now and do the rest, except for that whole thing about there might be hail or severe weather. Not a good time to be out doing anything at all.

It seems to have stopped for now. If only I had any confidence that this was the end of it for a bit. It just hasn't seemed like all that had been fussed about, so there must be more coming. I should wait.

Later again. I waited another hour or so, and the sky seemed to clear up. I think that it was mostly a beautiful day after that. We only got a little wet. It seemed to mainly rain a bit just to mess up my plans. I went on and got the errands done, and then I went to the dollar theater to watch The Blindside.

It's all good. It probably won't rain again today or on Easter, but it will probably rain Wednesday, so should get plenty of gardening done by then.

Inflation, and sad looking plants

I'm not sure how long I have been gardening (or at least attempting to make a garden), but it started sometime in the early nineties.

I was thinking how much more my gardening supplies cost.

Plants like tomatoes and peppers used to come in a same 4-pack. At places like Walmart, these 4-packs cost something like 2/1.00, 2/.88, or on rare occasions even 3/1.00. A packet of seeds from a company like Burpee would cost a bit more than a dollar. I stopped buying tomato and pepper seeds. For a dollar I could get about eight plants and not have to try to grow my own leggy seedlings on the windowsill.

For other plants that were best grown from seed, I found cheaper packets. I found places that sold seeds for a nickel, and several more places that sold seeds for a dime or a quarter. I bought a lot of seeds, just never for tomatoes or peppers, and rarely from a big name company, unless that was the only way to get a particular strain of something.

At some point I bought some small tomato cages, two for a dollar. Then I bought some larger ones for a dollar. Then I made some larger ones myself.

I can't find 4-pack plants anymore. For a while there were 6-packs for a dollar, but now they are closer to two dollars. Then there were the 2-inch pots, first 4/1.00, then 3/1.00, and now 2/1.00 when I can find them. 4-inch pots are usually twice as much if not more, but they are supposed to be bigger plants. This year I am finding a lot of 4-inch pots that just have 2-inch size plants in them.

The tomato cages that used to cost fifty cents or a dollar now cost three or four dollars. That just seems like too much to me. Most of the places that had the nickel seeds aren't around anymore. Places that sold seeds for a dime last year are selling them for a quarter this year. The big name seeds that used to be about a dollar are now closer to two dollars.

Some things seem about the same. The small hand tools that used to cost a dollar are still to be found at the dollar store.

Hard work has gone up, sort of. I think when I started my first garden, I was making about minimum wage, which I think was around 3.80 an hour. Now minimum wage is 7.15. But I am older, and the ground here is clay, while the ground at the old house was mostly sand, so everything is more work, and I have less strength to do it.

Of course, at the moment I have no job, minimum wage or otherwise, so one way of looking at it is that as long as I'm doing the work by myself, it is free.

Except for the cost of aspirin and muscle rub.


Yesterday, I went shopping for plants. I made a trip to Fort Worth and spent about twenty dollars. I didn't buy as much as I planned.

I used to buy from different places for different reasons. One place tended to have less expensive plants, another might have more variety of plants, and still another place seemed to have bigger healthier plants. So I would go to the first place and buy a lot of stuff, go to the third place and spend a bit more to get a few plants that were bigger, and then go to the second place and pay a bit extra to get a few more plants that I couldn't find at the other two places.

Okay, the place with the less expensive plants still seems to have the best prices, if they have what I want. But, like everyone else, they seem to have no cheap 4-packs, and less of the 2-inch pots than they used to. Still, they have the best prices on herbs, so I bought about ten. Last year I bought everything, thinking that I would plant a big herb garden and never need to buy most of them ever again. Except that most of the herb garden drowned last year, so this year I'm trying to be a bit more cautious. Still, the plants I bought were worth the trip.

There were two places that I used to go for the variety. One of them is still quite good, but it is quite a drive, and I usually end up spending too much money there, and sometimes I buy too much and end up not having enough space for the plants and seeds that I get there. In the future I need to stay away from this place until after I have a bed dug and ready to plant.

Another place that I used to get unusual seeds from seems to be getting rid of those displays. And it isn't that I bought a lot of those seeds, it was just nice to know that they were there and that I could buy them someday.

And the place that I used to buy the bigger plants seemed to not have such impressive plants this year. They seemed to have a lot of 2-inch size plants in the 4-inch size containers. And half the place looked like it was dying. Maybe those are plants from last year and they are going to be replaced soon, but mark them down or something. Some of these sad little plants still had four dollar price tags. Who wants to buy a dying plant for four dollars?

So that leaves my local independent. I don't usually buy a lot from her, cause her plants usually aren't special in any way, not the cheapest, not the biggest, and usually not the rare varieties (though she was the first I saw with the Stevia plant). She does have two things going for her. She is the closest place I can buy from, and she takes the time to mark all of the plants. The 2-inch and 4-inch containers often arrive without the little plastic name tags (they are just on the trays, and not on the individual containers that you take home), but she takes the time to write the names on popsicle sticks so that you know you've bought a cherry tomato instead of an early girl. If you buy a plant without a marker, that's probably because the truck just made a delivery and she hasn't had time to write them out yet.

I think that she'll be getting more of my business this year. With everyone else raising their prices, hers seem to be closer to the mid-range, and if I'm not getting the cheapest plants or the biggest plants I might as well go to the closest place and get plants that are properly marked.

Taking the day off

I have been hard at work in the garden, partially just because I wanted to get started planting things, and partially because of some other stuff that I won't get into just yet. And, as I had the place to myself for most of the week, I did actually get a lot done, as I was getting up with the sun and going to work (for fifteen minutes intervals) through most of the daylight hours. So, on three of those days, in between breaks, I got about five or six hours work done. So, maybe twenty hours or so for the week, not counting that I had started on it the previous week, or tried to start working the week before that, or that little bit that I managed to get done before the great snow of 2010.

Anyway, I have been transplanting things and picking up trash and emptying pots and filling pots and moving dirt from one end of the yard to the other, washing rocks, putting down a few stepping stones, etc.... I go to bed tired and wake up hungry and between moving this and that have watched most of Stargate SG1 season 8.

And it is not finished. Still, I do see a lot of progress. I think to myself, this part over here actually looks nice. If the weather would cooperate (and my would health hold up, and my husband would stay out of town, and I could find a magic ATM that dispenses money without deleting anything from my account), I could make this whole place look nice and have flowers and yummy vegetables and everything.

Of course, most of that won't happen. But the weather might be okay for several days next week, and I plan to keep working on it.

I have made such progress that one of my nicer neighbors came and almost hugged me.

The yard still needs to be weedwacked, which is something I just cannot seem to get the hang of, so my husband will have to do it.

Anyway, I had planned to do more of the same today, but it was just too windy. See, I blame the fact that I did not get more done earlier on the rain that came (dirt I can deal with, though slowly, but mud is entirely different), and today I used the wind as an excuse to spend most of the morning shopping.

I got an early start on the shopping. First there was breakfast at a 24-hour taco place at around seven this morning, then I looked around Lowe's, and then I went to Walmart to buy day lilies. I guess that I waited too late to buy those day lilies, but then I thought I'd go to a different Walmart. I found Pardon Me and New Toy. New Toy wasn't what I had planned to buy, but I decided that two Walmarts in one day (without a sale) was enough. And then as long as I was in the general area, I might as well go to Home Depot too. By the time I did all that it was time for lunch, so I had to stop at McDonald's on the way home.

And then when I was unloading the car, I noticed the wind was a bit much. I decided that the plants could wait a while. About half a hour later, it was worse. The trash had not yet been collected, and some of mine was starting to get blown down the street. While putting it back on the curb I briefly lost my glasses.

At that point I decided that I was done for the day.

A bit later, I went to my brother's place to watch cable, and then he took me to dinner.

Well, it was nice to stay clean all day.

I didn't buy that much (though my wallet is much lighter), but I did a lot of window shopping. There is all this stuff made from recycled tires that I will be buying as soon as I win the lottery. And I saw this product for sale at Walmart. This is the sort of thing that you buy if you have a lot of money and want to do the new Square Foot Gardening, while I have no money and sometimes try to do the old Square Foot Gardening by buying scrap lumber. I would love to have several of these, but they cost about forty dollars each. (I spend about four dollars each.)

Still, go and look at this on their site. I'm not sure about their calculations, but it is fun to play with.

Eventually, I want to have no grass in the backyard. I would rather just have pathways between the garden beds and trees and such. This is not impossible, as I do not have a giant backyard. Still if I am not going to have any grass, I will have to have a lot of stepping stones or mulch or rubber mats and such to replace the grass. That would take a lot of money, and a lot of work. But I am thinking that if I just buy a bit every time I am at Home Depot getting something else, that I would eventually get it done, and the work would not be so terrible, and I would not notice the money so much.

Speaking of not noticing the money so much, I am trying to remember where it all went to. The stepping stones have gone up to 1.27. I bought six while they were on sale for .94, and then I bought eight more. I bought one 2x6 rubber mulch roll for fifteen dollars, two bags of sand at four dollars each, about twelve dollars of bedding plants from a local independent, 2.50 on two bluebonnets, two dollars on a six pack of petunias, ten dollars on day lilies, and a bag of rubber mulch for seven dollars. The bag of rubber mulch is less than half the size of the mulch I usually buy, but it costs about four times as much. But I have decided to try it anyway, because in most places where I have put mulch, I can only see what I bought last year, maybe in some places the stuff from the year before, and the rest is gone. I'm assuming that the rubber mulch will last a lot longer than that.

So that was around seventy-five dollars, plus I've been mostly eating the dollar menu at McDonald's, so that and the taco place was probably another twenty. So I spent all the money that I had this week (just in case I had jury duty), except for twenty dollars, and I was thinking that wasn't too bad, cause I would spend the twenty on a phone card that I need to get soon. I was looking at my last twenty dollar bill and telling myself that it was okay, that of all that money I had spent (mostly on Saturday morning) most of it was either something that I really needed (like the sand) or something that I had planned to buy (like the day lilies, though I had thought that they would be six dollars instead of ten), and that my only real impulse buys were the two bluebonnets (which if I didn't buy them I probably would have just bought a second pack of petunias) and the 2x6 rubber mulch roll (which I bought at fifteen dollars after seeing it someplace else for twenty, and I figured at 1.27 each for stepping stones that I would pay about the same amount to cover 2x6, so I might as well get the rubber and have a look at it). But then as I was leaving the Home Depot I noticed that blueberry plants had been marked down to four dollars, and I bought one of those too.

So I no longer have twenty dollars left, I won't be buying that phone card til next week, and I now have a blueberry bush that I have to deal with. Blueberry plants are in the grand scheme of things, but I have not yet prepared that area where they will go, so now I have to wonder what I'm going to do with this plant until then.

At some point I went out and measured everything, but I seem to have misplaced the notebook where I wrote everything down, so I shall have to take all the measurements again. I should mark out where I want the fruit trees to go and build barriers to go around them so that I remember not to plant anything else there.

Now it is Sunday. Being all clean for a day was nice, but now it is time to get back to work.

Another day without jury duty

Monday, I would not have minded getting it over with. As it is now, I think maybe I would like to put it off til next week, maybe even next Friday.

Not that I really want to get out of it entirely. Now isn't a really bad time, so it is better now than it might be later. Still, I am unlikely to actually get picked. It will probably only be the one day.

But if the one day had been Monday, that would have been better, since I would not have had to worry about parking. And, I had thought, that any day this week would have been the same. But my husband was unexpectedly added to this week's schedule yesterday. I can hardly complain that he's going back to work, even if it might not last.

Still, it would have been better to get the jury thing done without worrying about parking. Or, if I actually get picked for a jury, it would have been nice to go that first day without having to deal with parking. Worrying about all the other little details is enough for the first day. Worrying about parking could have waited til the second day.

But, it isn't going to work out that way. My husband will be working on each day that I might get called. So now I'm hoping that it is a week from Friday. I would still have to deal with the parking that day, but then I would have Saturday and Sunday off to deal with the traumatic experience, even if I did get picked. And I think that the next couple of days I might have other concerns that would be an added distraction that I don't need on top of maybe being a juror and having to deal with Dallas.

I hate Dallas.

Today is a beautiful day. I regret wasting so much of it. I have even attempted a bit of gardening today. I am trying to mix some soil, and I planted one bluebonnet. Okay, one bluebonnet is not a big deal, but I waited too late to plant seeds. And the one plant should make seeds that would probably plant themselves nearby for next year. After that I had to mail a letter (a letter that I've put off mailing for about two weeks), and to get over that bit of unpleasantness I stopped at a local plant place and spent five dollars. I now have two pepper plants, two tomato plants, a spinach and a lettuce. I couldn't buy much more than that. I have to keep at least ten dollars on me, just in case I have to go park in Dallas I don't want to get my husband to go to the ATM after working so late. And besides, the beds really need a bit of work before I start filling them with tomato and pepper plants.

Yesterday I tried to drag out more stuff to sort out. As some stuff like the yarn seems to get more organized, it leaves me with this growing mound of other stuff that I haven't figured out where it goes. I have noticed now that the pile of stuff is large enough that it mostly blocks the path to the dryer. So either I can't do laundry, or I can't add to this mound of stuff.

But, no jury summons yet, so maybe I can put off the laundry one more day.

The first day of asparagus

There was asparagus in the back yard today. Not just tons of it, but I cut six stalks of it. I have enough that I will either eat it with pasta tomorrow for lunch, or maybe I'll eat it later today.

I mostly write this as a note to myself, so I'll know what day it was, so I'll know what day to expect it next year.

I didn't like asparagus until rather late in life. I must have been nearly thirty. I only like it if I cook it. Everyone else overcooks it or makes stuff with canned or frozen. I don't like any of that. Anyway, I decided to plant lots of asparagus where I used to live. And then when it was growing enough to eat it, I had to move away.

Maybe now I'll have to move away from here too.

I think it would be nice if there were all different kinds of asparagus, different flavors, different growing times, different colors. It would be nice if there were chili pepper flavored stalks that just grew out of the ground without having to plant it every year. Or tomato flavor. Or squash flavor.

I like my garden, but I don't like the work. Asparagus is a lot of work, but once it is done, it's done, and you can just enjoy it for ten years or more. Except for fruit trees and rhubarb, I can't think of much else that works that way.

Today was weird

So, I live in Texas, in a part of Texas that rarely gets really cold, but unfortunately not in a part that is warm and sunny all the time, and I live nowhere near the beach. But anyway, in this part of Texas, with some extra work, one could probably garden all year round, though I am not one of those people committed to doing that extra work, and I would rather not be doing that much work at all. Still, after a week of really nice weather, I thought that it might be a good idea to get started on the spring stuff, and of course right when I decide that is what I should do, then it rains and it is going to freeze later and all of that.

Now the thing about getting started with the gardening is that if you start a particular project that you have to get certain parts of it done before it starts to rain again, or else it looks worse than before you did anything. So, if you were going to turn over a bed, and you get it done before it rains, then that is fine. And, if you decide that it is still too cold and do nothing, and then it rains, then that is fine too, except that you will still have work to do later. But if you decide to turn over a bed, and you don't get done with it, and then it rains, and then you have a bit of a hole in the ground which then fills up with water, and the hole is then surrounded by piles of dirt, which during the rain turn into piles of mud. And then it looks really ugly, and the job isn't finished, and then when it is dry enough to try again you probably didn't save that much time by getting started on it earlier.

In fact, sometimes you have made more work for yourself, as the piles of mud might get to be really wet piles of mud, which travel a bit and it is really a hassle getting the dirt back in the state that was meant to be so that you can plant stuff.

So that is very similar to what has happened here, except that I was moving some dirt from one place to another, and hadn't quite got to the part of digging the hole, but I still a lot of what was almost usable dirt and is now a lot of really wet mud. I was attempting to mix the dirt with sand and compost, and I didn't get much of that done, and I will have to wait for it to get really warm again before I can finish. And while I am waiting for it to be nice warm weather again, it all looks a bit messy, even more so than last week before I got it into my head to get out the shovels and such.

I haven't done much house cleaning this week, as I was trying to do this little garden project instead, and I wanted to do a lot of work before it rained. And then that other stuff happened, and then the rest was just the usual bit of everything taking a lot longer than I imagine. And it is quite wet now. I had thought that I would at least do some work outside this morning before it rained, but I guess that it rained some last night that I did not notice until I went outside this morning. Not a really good rain, just enough to get everything wet so that gardening was out of the question.

So then it was back inside, and I got a bit more rest, since there didn't seem to be any rush to do anything. There was then a phone call from my mother, which I won't get into now but maybe I will post about it later. And then I thought that I would get started with the prep work for lunch, and then I would watch a video before going to the library so that I could take everything back. And then my husband walked in the door.

I wasn't supposed to see him again until Friday night. But there was some screw up at work. I might have made fun of this before, but my husband always seems to work for someone who cannot connect the idea of "working out of town" with "he isn't home." So they will send him out of town, and then they will call here looking for him, when they know that he isn't here. The first few times that this happened, I really panicked and thought that he was missing and must have been in a accident. Over time I just get used to the fact that these people who are supposed to know all about going out of town and such still just don't get it, and that they can't be bothered to look and see which is a person's home phone and which is a cell phone, or even bother to find out if there is a cell phone, and so they just call here, and no one ever makes a note that this is not a cell phone. And they will also never make the connection that supplies needed at the site should be sent to the site, and not to the house when he isn't home, and possibly there is no one home, and possibly the packages left on my doorstep would just get stolen.

So that was the first thing that happened, that this new person called my house to talk to my husband who was more than a hundred miles away at the time. And I had no where to forward the message to, and it wasn't an important message anyway. It wasn't anything like tomorrow's schedule has been changed. She just wanted to know how things went.

So that was Wednesday. Thursday morning, my husband went to the site and waited out in the car until someone eventually showed up to tell him that they had cancelled a couple of weeks ago, and he wouldn't be needed today.

Now, he should have called to make sure that Friday's schedule hadn't been changed and then just gone on to the next site. But, having the whole day off, he came home instead, having not paid any attention to the weather reports. He just thought that he would stay here and get up really early in the morning rather than spend another night in a motel where there is nothing to do.

It is going to be cold and rainy, and possibly there will be freezing rain either tonight or tomorrow, and staying here tonight is just out of the question, unless the schedule had been changed, which so far doesn't seem to be the case. So it was decided that he would stay for lunch, but not dinner, and that after spending a few hours with me he would drive on to the place where he is supposed to work tomorrow.

So, after we got all that worked out, it was time for lunch, maybe a bit early but close enough. I finished cooking, and then went ahead with my original plan of watching some silly video, only now my husband was watching it with me.

The video was Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I had grabbed a lot of videos from the library, knowing that it was probably going to rain and that I would probably not have any TV to watch, but maybe getting this particular video was a bit too much. But how bad could it be, right?

I hope that I pushed the wrong button or something. It seems like you have to select either the version shown in the theater or an even longer version, or something. So I selected the theatrical version. Or, at least, I thought that I had. If this was the version shown in the theater, I just can't imagine what was added later.

Anyway, someone said the "F" word every five minutes, and there was full frontal nudity and everything.

Okay, so in the three or four hours that I'm trying to have a nice afternoon with my husband, half of it was spent on this dumb movie. And then there was other stuff, and then there was more food and then there was a trip to the library, and then he headed out.

And now I'm wondering if that was all a mistake, that he should have left right after lunch, and now he's going to get stuck in all this rain, if not worse.

Hopefully in about an hour or so he will call and tell me he has a nice warm motel room.

So now I have this odd bit of having one more night to myself, even though I did not have the day to myself, and the only thing that I got done was cooking lunch and going to the library. Anything else that I had thought I would do today will probably have to be done tomorrow, and it probably won't get done then either.

Saturday, I have to cook something or bake something, or just give up and buy something. Sunday I have this thing to go to, and I have to either bring a dessert or a vegetable. I suppose tomorrow or the next day I will go shopping and see what speaks to me.

I woke up too early this morning

And, since I had the house to myself, I actually decided to watch TV and such. When there is no one else in the house, you can do that sort of thing.

But now I am tired and wanting to go back to sleep. Again, since there is no one else here, I could do that if I wanted. Or, at least, I could try. But it probably won't work. The sun is up now and everything.

I think I will fry an egg and see how I feel after that.

The giant heap of stuff next to the bed has become a smaller heap of stuff, and maybe it will get smaller still and I can at least put the stuff in boxes to be sorted out later. At least, I tell myself that I will sort out the boxes later. Anyway, stuff in boxes on the floor is a bit neater than just stuff on the floor without the boxes.

I guess I did the easy stuff Tuesday, though it didn't seem easy at the time. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I did the obvious stuff Tuesday. Wednesday I still through away another bag of garbage, but it took longer to find that much stuff I didn't want anymore. Finding that much stuff today would take longer still, so I think I will stop trying at about lunch time and switch to something else.

Two more days and nights with the house to myself. On Saturday I have plans. I'm looking for stuff that could be made into Halloween decorations. Halloween is getting close now.

My husband found another hundred dollars. I guess he won't get stranded out of town now.

Yesterday, the power went off, then on, then off, and then it went back and forth so fast I didn't count. And then it just stayed off for a while, but still less than an hour. I gave up and read a bit of a book. I don't read much anymore. My eyes aren't good and I don't enjoy it like I used to.

It rains a lot now. It doesn't just pour down rain day and night, but we do get wet for a little while, and it doesn't stop long enough to dry out from last week. All this water going to waste. I wish I had been able to start a fall garden. But at this point the seeds would just get washed away, and I don't have money to buy seedlings.

The water that isn't going towards growing vegetables is just making the grass grow. I will probably get a complaint letter on the door.

The fall bulbs I transplanted are starting to bloom. I'm not sure if I'd call this a success or not. Most of the bulbs are still too small to flower, so maybe next year. And I did get some flowers. And maybe some more will bloom later. They usually come in waves, depending on when there has been enough rain. So I don't know if this is all of them, or if this is just the first wave.

I'm still thinking of going back to bed.