- WTF Amanda you tool what was all this crap about sweeping floors in a coffee shop and living the bohemian life 'cause you don't need a career to feel validated why so silent and depressed WTF
- First and Second Gardens
- Chickens
- What I am reading
- What I am writing (or thinking about writing)
- WTF thought you were going to sew your own clothes and stuff and embroider every day and sit out on your truck and WTF
Okay, okay. #1
I have let myself get a little upset about some extenuating circumstances, but I am okay now, I really, really did not like my Plan B but in the past few days I have really started warming up to it, and I think I might even be able to put my love into it. I have put so much love into Plan A, loved it with all of my heart, but it's not giving me any love back. Ha ha, oddly reading Bride of the Water God is turning my mind (See #4 below) from this narrow-minded thinking and seeing what harm can come when it doesn't love you back.
So now that I am giving love to Plan B, I can do the hardest thing for Plan A. Well, I will tell you what really turned me around. Two nights ago I was literally roaming approaching midnight, inside and outside of the house, I watched the moon, listened to the deafening roar of crickets and listened, listened, I followed all of my best effort, read some Japanese poetry, and I knew when I needed to climb the stairs and go back into bed and see if I could get myself to work the next day.
At the top of the stairs was my first indoor scorpion sighting of summer. As always my heart and will turned to jellified terror. I was alone. I had to dispatch the scorpion alone, and quietly. I didn't really have to, but I had to. I felt that. So I watched it knowing I couldn't disturb it or upset it until the final moment. Admittedly I did this in the most inelegant and cowardly way feasible. I sucked it up in the dust buster, set the dust buster on the front stoop, and shut and locked the door immediately.
And I thought, there was a moment, I was absolutely terrified, what if it doesn't work, I am close to it, it could dodge the little nozzle and run up my arm and run up my face and I was literally cold and stone-like, and I thought, this is my answer. I am lifted out of inanimate terror into action, and since then I have started healing, (I need to mention it was large, sorry I do, these scorpions out here are the size of crawfishes)
so I can start thinking about other things again.
#2 First and Second Gardens.
It is funny, but First Garden names itself, it persists in being First Garden in my mind, not only the First Garden I planted, but also the best-growing garden. Last year it did not look like much, but my perennial plants survived the harsh winter to flourish this spring. I scarcely need to weed First Garden because my herbs have turned to bushes that jealously guard every sunny patch of ground.
Right now in First Garden, I have two rues, which bloomed earlier this spring. I never got around to making any healing concoctions with the scary-looking oozy cinquefoil-like blossoms and simply clipped them. They, my rosemary and lavender grow in windswept fashion because a wind is constantly blowing from the south. I can tell they don't like it but there's nothing I can really do. I have onions planted, giving them a happy long growing season, Pennsylvania Dutch tea thyme which shrivels in the heat but is surviving despite how delicate it looks. I don't know when I will be able to harvest it for tea, grows so slowly.
Additionally my north-most row is the exotic row. Vietnamese Cilantro, Moroccan Mint and Chocolate Mint, all quickly becoming bushes. Oh, and my curry plant, which is becoming tall.
First Garden receives direct morning light and filtered noon-sun light. Somehow I managed to find the perfect plot of ground beneath the crumbling and discarded dog house.
Second Garden is not a happy place. Happy in Second Garden is Wormwood-- very happy plant, and the St. John's Wort is to my surprise alive, and in similar condition to the tea thyme. But otherwise Second Garden is a wasteland. The patchouli has never enjoyed living with me, the yarrow and angelica are nearly dead. The oregano and French lavender are new additions. They may be okay.
Also a word on the huge seed order I made last year. What the hell. Okay, most of the seed packets yielded nothing, and it can't be me, because my lil clearance packets from Big Lots have yielded fine, and the ones the did grow-- they are not the plants they are supposed to be, they look similar but they are not the right plants. I don't know what is going on there, but those herbs are of no use to me because I don't know what they are and so can't use them in cooking or healing.
Okay, the leaves of the "marsh mallow" plants look similar, but basically the plants never stalk up and they have never bloomed, and they are really too heart-shaped, marsh mallow leaves are elongated. I'm not about to dig the roots and do something with it, I don't know what it is, maybe it's a mallow, but what if not.
In addition the St. John's Wort. Oh boy. St. John's wort has small leaves and viney stalks, like thyme and oregano, and it is a pale silvery green color. Now what grew from these seeds is pale silvery green but it started stalking up and the leaves started getting huge and sort of forked-like. That is not St. John's Wort.
No more of that.
In addition I am growing potatoes. They are doing sort of great. I have some russets and some purple potatoes. The ground out there in what I thought was going to be my vegetable garden is incredibly hard though. I cannot even weed around the potatoes without being clumsy and hurting them. What a disappointment, and there's even a water line out there. If the potatoes can make it amongst the weeds then that's that. In the mean time I will wait for rain, softer ground and a chance to improve the terrain a little bit.
It takes a long time to make a garden look established. To me it takes one year. First Garden I am incredibly proud of. I am a little afraid Second and Potato Garden will never be there, or maybe Second Garden is meant to grow only my absinthe-related plants.
#3 Chickens
We have three baby chicks this morning, #3 hatched this morning. It's a little scary to me how when I go out there, suddenly there's another chick, it's weird. I don't know that there will be more. Cinderella has lost interest in her eggs and well, we can't support more than five chickens in this coop. Wait, I guess we techically have six now. So.
Chick 1 has the most cream on its wing tips and is taller and thinner, Chick 2 came out even bigger than Chick 1 which had a whole day to grow, it is really quite chubby and has the most cream on its face, and Chick 3 is almost completely black with a little cream on its wings. Somehow we sensed that Chick 1 is a male. It's sort of a sense. We saw our chickens when they were day-olds and can see this chick's similarities to Rooster. I will see what happens. Some roosters do not fight each other so we'll see. Rooster and the other hen have been completely nonviolent toward the chicks, so I am not doing any of the things my chicken book says I must do, no heat lamps, no incubators, please, I have other things to do. Cinderella did this, she can take care of what happened.
#4 Reading...
Bride of the Water God -- seems like it should have finished a long time ago. Like I mentioned above, most of the conflict is derived from people who fall in love with other people and won't give up no matter what when they should have moved on, when they even have someone in love with them, someone respectable. Please. It felt like it had ended about half-way and then launched into the backstory of the character's parents' pasts, which I wasn't sure I needed to know about but ended up being kind of interesting, though there are way more swords and dragon things than I would like to see.
Anyway I can really see the thinking behind it. The story's almost finished now. I'm sure there must only be one more book being translated. If you love someone and they don't love you back, move on, please, don't cause some terrible trouble.
Shirley -- well, different in that it's actually a novel, 1840s, the main character is pining away for Robert-- okay, I've wanted to say this a long time, I know this is meant to be Bronte's subtle irony. With a sidelong glance or careless word the hero Robert can inflict terrible pain and devastation onto the heroine Caroline who is in love with him. He knows she is, but mysteriously he moves to and fro in the mysterious ways of the unattached male hero, leaving her in doubt, in torment. She's perfectly fine-looking, shouldn't she pick herself up and move on? She tries to again and again but this is an English Romantic novel, completely different than Korean mythology man-hwa, here we see the heart's emotions must receive center stage, not logical good sense.
Not sure which idea I want to embrace.
I thought last night actually that Charlotte Bronte must have been reincarnated as a goddess when she died, and she created me, because I am exactly like her characters in painful exacting detail, and as my goddess she torments me the way she torments her characters with twists and turns in fate, constantly. And actually, this makes more sense to me than any religion that I have ever heard of, and I'm seriouser than you think I am.
Also reading Prisoner of the Iron Tower -- jeez this is so good, I'm sorry, when do you see that the middle book of a trilogy is so incredibly good, how can locking up your hero in a tower and focusing on the minor characters be interesting, well it is, it's amazing, I love this book so much better than well most of real life. Please let me live in a cottage with the owls and teach me to play the gusly, please, please. I love Kiukirilya so much, she's the best fantasy novel heroine ever.
I want to talk about Fairy Tales Retold but am running out of time, reserving that for a later post, need the book anyway to share my thoughts...
#5 What I am writing or thinking of writing,
Well, I have been writing in my real journal with a pencil lately, writing a story and switching the perspective whenever I want, or writing the same scene over and over, I read back over it yesterday and felt my whole person there on the page, I really like that, I would rather be pencilled on the page than be here, here's a brief excerpt, for the most part the story can only be nonsense because the characters are vague and spirit-like,
A spiderweb of pearls
Rain sorrowing against the barn's roof
A dove lands within the quiet calm
and I cross the deluge for a closer look.
My face and hands are dripping with rain as I stand as quietly as I can to observe.
Even though I am coltish and clumsy it doesn't leave,
even though I long for it to stay, it stays.
This is not a dove, this is my dream, and as I stand outside looking into the quiet and the dry
Clumsy foolish dull and rain-spattered I forget all else
Something is different, the earth has changed it tilt--
#6 WTF
I am doing a small embroidery gift, I have larger projects too, it is so hard to sit down and work on these, but that's the point. Lately I have been really interesting in simple clothes again. That's good news for my sewing, isn't it, something I could actually make instead of my ridiculous pipe dreams. At the same time sometimes I stay awake too late at night and get caught on my pipe dreams again and drag out all my patterns. Argh. Yes, it's true, in life, sewing is last, absolutely last, there are ten hundred thousand things that I have to do before I can sit down and sew and by the time I do them I am too tired to sew, and as far as sewing on my breaks, sigh since that weird man yelled at me I haven't had the courage but need to start being ***me*** again and not this freaking tool that cries over stupid things.
Anyway, that's all, adieu, keep being great, I will keep remembering how to be me.