April-a recap

April 15-30

mutant trees and my first lady bug day

2005 Apr 26

my gear got stuck somewhere between neutral and first for about the first hour or so this morning, but once i went outside i felt a lot better.

got a lot of things done this morning. got everything that was in 4"into at least gallon containers, and set up the wallawattaz (my pronunciation of "the wall of water" plant protectors) all part of my shady plot to grow tomatoes in our weird weird climate of hot hot days and cold cold nights. maybe this year it'll work out better.

some guy was over working on farrah's old place. he said he was going to cut down some trees as well which set off alarms of panic (my usual response to the prospect of tree felling). turns out it was nothing i should worry about. he's actually trying to eradicate a vicious or rather, pernicious stand of Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven) that has invaded our little complex, and eradication of this beast is not likely on any account. i'm sure their survival is no doubt enchanced by the fact that the roots have invaded the sewer pipes, "The root system is aggressive enough to cause damage to sewers and foundations. "and i'm 110% certain that's why the water pressure/drainage is so crappy here. he was lamenting the fact that all the trees around here are suckers off a root system, which is no surpise, "Established trees also produce numerous suckers from the roots and resprout vigorously from cut stumps and root fragments...Root suckers appear similar to seedlings, but would be connected to a pre-existing lateral root, and would be nearly impossible to remove effectively. Cutting alone is usually counter-productive because ailanthus responds by producing large numbers of stump sprouts and root suckers. ". hoo boy you got your work cut out for ya...the tap roots are all under pavement, foundations, etc. it's gonna take some serious intervention and success is relatively unlikely.

trudy got me a stevia plant and a pepino dulce at the master gardener's fair so now i have those guys to go with the tomatoes, herbs, lemongrass, a pepper, peas, potatoes, and strawberries. i've also got some nepeta and pennyroyal that i'm trying to water propagate, since pennyroyal oil is real hard to come by here, and i want some nepeta around for these nasty plagues i'm getting. keeping smokey out of it will be a challenge.

a little while ago, i saw a lady bug sitting on the leaves of my sage plant. aww friend. the first beneficial insect i've seen around these parts. i'm getting hoverflies too which apparently are pollinators/parasites of aphids so we're up to two beneficials! yay! (unless you count black widow spiders living under the stairs).

almost a kinda summer day

2005 Apr 25

found a big black crow feather first thing when i hopped off the bus. picked it up and the next thing i know i find money. yep. this one's a lucky crow feather.

today's the first day that really felt like summer's on it's way.

the other day i saw a paper lying around in the breakroom and saw that it had already hit 90 in memphis. wow. i'm baking when it's only 70...look how downright sissified i've gotten in only one year. i'm gonna wilt like lettuce in an oven come july. i need to work on my heat tolerance i guess. my job might be amenable to that as well...

it's amazing what lies people tell. some lady told me that someone recommended that she plant photinia 1 ft apart! wahhh!!!! that's just crraaaaaaaaaaaazzzzzy!

it was april's birthday and we had fun with it. called her up front on a flimsy excuse and serenaded her infront of customers. hope she wasn't too mortified...i know i probably would be, but it was fun surprising her with cake. bad enough to be working on your birthday, but cake makes things better.

got to show brian off. and take him to the bakery across the way. time he discovered my world a bit.

bad dreams

2005 Apr 23

I've been having a lot of weird dreams but last night's was just baaaaaad.

i dreamt that i was back at declerye visiting everybody and tj died...i cried and cried and we all cried and cried and for some reason there was this horrible state funeral (which she would have hated) complete with a baptist minister and a really bad choir that kept singing christmas songs (even though it was summertime). after about 10 minutes we all rebelled (damn anarchists) and had a big brawl. then later on in the dream we were all on a fieldtrip with ceylon and a bunch of inner city kids and the bus driver was high and crashed the bus into some lake and we were all trapped in it and only like 5 people were able to get out.

whew. i don't know what's up with all that. brian said he had a bad dream as well.

on a completely different note, we got some cool pelargoniums (scented geraniums) at work, so i got a few of those, and a patio tomato (reputed to be good in containers). I'm up to: peas, spinach (not doing so well but hanging in there), some marigolds, primrose that still looks pretty good, lots of sage, lemon thyme, lime thyme, varigated oregano, lemon balm, garlic, onions, a leek (lost a couple of them), carrots, epazote, lavender, chocolate mint, a pepper plant, 2 other tomatoes, some miscellaneous potatoes, and basil growing from seed. all of this is in containers of varying sizes, mainly 5 gallon/15 gallon tree pots, and a few ornamental pots. The nice thing is I'll be able to move them around so they can be in exactly the spot they need to be in (which was a problem last year)

it sure looks like it's gonna be a rainy day. that could be good, or it could suck. at any rate, it'll be fun to do the ashland thing again this weekend. i love listening to the froaks croak all day long, and i have already seen a couple of things over there i've got a notion to want. ho boy...

dropping things

2005 Apr 19

i'm having a shitty time of it lately. i keep dropping everything i pick up, which is getting really old.

the weather has been really crazy lately. rain/sun/rain/sun/cold/hot/rain/sun. okay, i am sure i don't know what sort of attire is appropriate for this kind of randomness, so maybe i should be wearing a wading boots and a scarf with shorts when leaving the house. oy.

cool plants that i have around now include: lemon grass and pineapple sage. i'm already pretty darn excited about 3 varigated sages and varigated oregano, and lime thyme. just think of all the bad puns you can make with lime thyme...

the bad neighbors are moving so hopefully this will all be soon behind us. hopefully the next person won't be more of the same. it all makes me want to live in a tent out in the woods. there's a lot to be said for it.

we were really goofing it up at work the other day. i don't know what's gotten into us, but we were laughing so hard...

today the bus was really late, so i got to class half an hour late. i hate that crap. come to think of it we were being kind of goofy in there too. but i think the video helped. catholic girls schools generate a lot of material that's good to poke fun at i guess. i wonder what i would have been like to go to highschool in japan. i'm guessing parts of it would have been awesome, but i doubt i would've been too good at staying out of trouble. still though, i bet it was an awesome experience for a non-Japanese person to have had.

i hope tomorrow goes a little better and i get over this dropping stuff curse that i'm under. it's pretty lame.

got them slaughterhouse blues

(屠場 ブルース)

2005 Apr 17

a buncha folks musta gone and put on the crankypants on the way out the door...some of the people who rolled up on us needed to spend some time in the time-out chair. myself included.

Other than that it was a pretty mellow day. I'm still getting used to the whole phenomenon where people come and take care of their own needs...not as much hand-holding as what i'm used to. the one big exception is that it seems more people who come to "the farm" take their trees home instead of sending "the help" to come get them, so i don't get to pull trees whenever i feel like it.

i'm pretty excited about hearing the chorus 歌 of 蛙 frogs. 雨がよく降っている, そして 蛙 は 雨 が だいすき it's been raining frequently and there's a big pond out front so the frogs are lovin' it. it's been so long since i've heard 蛙 frogs. it reminds me of declerye and springtime and our ponds, and all the toads having late night orgies under the light of the full moon. the geese 鵞鳥 over by the orchard are a trip (although we have those at Medford because we're on the flyway to bear creek where there's a big ol' pond 池 full of geese 鵞鳥). i watched the buzzards 禿鷹 circling in advance of the storm 風. we got a regular "gullywasher" as the old timers used to say. then when i came home it hailed pretty good for about 5 minutes, and i even heard some thunder 雷 .

don't know how it got started, but 屠場 (slaughterhouses) seems to be the topic of the day. general consensus is that if people had to go out back and catch and shoot a chicken 鶏 everytime they wanted some KFC, things would be quite different.

I know plenty of people who freak out when they see duck 家鴨 carcasses hanging in a Chinatown storefront, but will eat hamburgers all week long. thanks to corporate america, and advertising, we have very little sense of reality 現実感 anymore. i hate ta break it to ya baby, but that big mac use'ta be a cow. you know what those look like, dontcha? you can only hope it at least got to frolick in a field...that's not even a given in these days of depressing texas feedlots.

ame ame fure fure 雨雨降れ降れ

2005 Apr 16

The rain started the minute I got to work.

仕事に 行く 時 は, 雨が 降ている である.

I didn't have any time study for the test really, but I can always hope I did alright anyway.

Working over at Ashland is a whole different experience. I suspect it's normally a lot busier on a normal Saturday, but due to the weather, we probably only got the really hardcore shoppers. Which is fine. I don't know where anything is yet.

Sloshing around in my barn boots it reminded me of my farmwork days, out in the rain, pulling up weeds. I watched the clouds drift through the gaps in the mountains, 山襞 は 山霧 に 立ち迷う. the hawk circling above the peaks 峻嶺 の上に 鷹 が 旋転する, and a few critters passing through the tree lot. There were even some frogs in one of the greenhouses.

かえるは グリーンハウス に いる.

sorry (すみません) if some of this is unreadable (よみにくい) gibberish. i'm trying out posting some stuff in Japanese (日本語 ). If you are configured to read Shift JIS this might look a little better, but in the meantime I'll do sidebyside (英和 )so it's not all hopeless. I'm excited about my new Japanese display capabilities, so I'd like to get more practice (練習) using characters (かな). Arabic would be pretty exciting too, but i"ll confess my vocabulary is somewhat limited at the moment.

Brian says that Sideways was a major disappointment. "I could have done better", he says (on record). And he's so full of crap, isn't he? (endquote) but you know I was digging the pinot noir speech. although sometimes in real life my taste in plants lean towards things that will take care of themselves without much if any intervention from me. but i also get really excited about plants that only grow in weird little microclimate niches. and maybe brian is like a pinot noir of guys...a bit delicate, not for just everyone, but a lot of potential and worth the trouble.

still haven't gotten sick outright, but i've been a lot weaker, and feel somewhat lacking in my usual stamina. hopefully this illness will pass me by though. I don't want to get intimate with another bronchial infection right now.