I haven’t felt much like posting lately. I’ve been sick and just not in the mood to write. I’m still not in the mood to write but it’s been almost a week so I’m going to try to think of some things that won’t bore you, my two readers, to tears.

I’m working from home this week, because our building at work is undergoing renovations. They’ve ripped out the ceilings, some walls, a bunch of doors, and have turned off the air conditioning. Oh, did I mention that they didn’t find new places for everyone in the building to work during the duration? No, people are expected to show up, sit at their desks, suffer through the sweltering heat and humidity, breathe in dust and asbestos and mold and god only knows what else that’s floating around in the air, and tolerate the incessant drilling and hammering noises. It’s only because my boss is freaking awesome that I’m allowed to work at home while all this is going on.

I wish we could have cats at work. It would decrease the stress level. They are SO CUTE when they are trying to get your attention. Neko has been all over me, all day long.  She’s either lounging on my desk, or trying to drape her formidable bulk across my mousing hand, or purring and licking my fingers, or trying various other things to get me to pay attention to her. I might set up a cat-cam tomorrow.

“Ha! I wrap myself around your teacup and leave you no room to mouse! PET ME!”

The other thing that happened last week – the building flooded AGAIN. We had a rainstorm Thursday night and it was heavy enough to flood our floor for the FOURTH time in the three years we’ve been there. Just like last time, they did not bother to take up the carpets or dry them out adequately. I am sure the mold is growing like crazy. It smelled pretty bad when I went in on Monday afternoon.

I can’t understand why the higher-ups are continuously and consistently willing to let their people work in a building that by all rights should not be occupied during heavy construction periods (including during the asbestos abatement from last December, when they insisted that the air quality was just fine but refused to show us air test results), or why they seem perfectly happy to let mold grow underneath our feet and enter our lungs when it repeatedly floods.

It just seems to me like there should be a lawsuit mentioned. I have half a mind to pry up some carpet tiles and take some photographs of what’s certainly growing underneath.

Anyway.

I was sick enough over the weekend that I couldn’t go down to Austin with Kathryn, to visit Debbie and tour the wildflowers of Central Texas. I’m bummed about that; I was looking forward to a girls’ weekend! Food, drinks, giggles, M&Ms, staying up till at least 11 p.m…. god I’m old. I hope that we can reschedule for a little later this spring.

We have termites. EW! TERMITES! We paid a painful amount of money for the pest control people to come out and shoot poison into the ground around our house and drill through our foundation to shoot poison underneath the house too. I absolutely hate poisoning the ground but don’t know what else to do to get rid of those little fuckers. I don’t think they managed to do too much damage though. I’m just glad we caught them before they SWARMED. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. Once they poke out through your walls, it’s only a matter of time before they decide it’s time to look for a new place to nest, and they come shooting out the little holes they’ve made in your walls, one after another after another, and fly around until they find a suitable structure to eat. INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. We scotch-taped over their little holes in the walls so they couldn’t get out, forcing them back underground where the poison is (hopefully). However, this afternoon we noticed a bunch of them swarming around in our front yard. No idea where that batch came from; maybe from someone else’s yard, or the creek behind us. Anyway, apparently today was swarm day so I’m really glad we caught our infestation in time. EW!

Doc did some very cute husbandly stuff over the past few days - today he sprayed that termite swarm in the front yard, and also got rid of a wasp nest that was being built by our garage door. Damn paper wasps. Over the weekend he also fixed my shower; one of the springy washers in the faucet finally disintegrated and the shower wouldn’t stop spraying. He turned off the water to the house, after scooping about a cubic yard of yucky stuff out of the water main access hole in our sidewalk, and went to Home Depot and – surprisingly – found the right replacement bit for the faucet. I say “surprisingly” because nothing in our house is standard size, or made by companies that still exist. We really need to replace the whole faucet though, and for that we have to go down to Teter’s on Gaston to get the right kind. Apparently it’s the only place in town that stocks this old nonexistant brand anymore.

So I celebrated Earth Day by not only telecommuting (which saved about 1/4 gallon of gas and 14 miles on the Prius), but also by being a responsible tree caregiver and having our trees trimmed. The price wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, and they look great. Our backyard looks much roomier and a bit sunnier now that the 30-foot tall Bradford Pear has been “lifted and thinned,” as they call it, and our ginormous Land of the Lost Buford Hollies growing in the courtyard are still about 15 feet tall, but much thinner and lighter now. We were afraid they might bend and crack under their own weight. I’d post a photo, but without a “before” shot it really won’t look like much to you.

Today after lunch I saw a car with a banana peel draped over its door handle:

I’ve been playing around with the nightshot mode on Doc’s camera. I like the effect I get when there’s still a little ambient light.

My garden is growing! Some of it, anyway. I may not have any tomatoes or morning glories, but by god I’m going to have lots and lots of zucchini this summer.

When my parents moved six years ago, they gave us their potted Satsuma orange tree. The first year, it produced a glorious crop of 40-50 little oranges. Then, because I’m such a horrible gardener, it was attacked by whiteflies and black sooty mold, and it took several years of regular treatments with garlic-pepper-seaweed tea, compost tea, horticultural oil, and insecticidal soap (and me spending hours with wet paper towels, gently scrubbing the soot off each individual leaf). The poor little tree was too sick to produce any oranges.

Eventually, the whiteflies stopped coming back.

Last spring it produced dozens of tiny little orange blossom buds like this, which turned into teeny tiny oranges, about 1 mm across… and all promptly fell off after about 2 weeks of growth.

This spring we’ve got teeny tiny orange flower buds again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fruit!

I managed to pull off one of those rare energy-filled productive sprees this past weekend, consisting of paring down and trimming away the old, and encouraging growth of the new. I guess I have spring on the brain.

NEW GROWTH
I bought a bunch of seeds and planted our garden (some directly in the container pots, some in what passes for “ground” here, and some in a seedling starter tray). With luck, we’ll have tomatoes, onions, French heirloom green beans, heirloom Chinese Giant bell peppers (I love that name!), zucchini squash, pickling cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, blue star morning glories, sweet pea vines, and coleus. I’ve been reading “Under the Tuscan Sun” by Frances Mayes (I haven’t seen the movie but apparently the book is very different) and I think that part of the reason that I’m in a gardening mood is her beautifully simple, poetic language about fresh food.

I think that I may have overextended my reach with this garden. I have four long “windowbox” style containers, and three of them are full of beans, squash, and cukes. My starter tray has everything else in it… but I only have one container left to put seedlings in once they’re ready! I have a feeling I’m going to have to invest in more containers in a few weeks. Also, the instructions on the seed packets direct you to plant the seeds pretty far apart. I’m not sure exactly how this is going to turn out, because I bunched the seeds up in the pots. I guess that if any of them do take off, I can thin them out once they’re established.

I put the morning glories in the red containers that the giant rosemary used to be in (those finally got transplanted to their nice ceramic pots), and set those on the bench by the fence in hopes that they’ll trail up the fence and along the top. I raked a lot of the leaves from the only patch of ground we have in our backyard — underneath the neighbor’s Bradford Pear tree — and attempted to dig a shallow furrow along the deck railing for my sweet pea vine seeds, but the ground is mostly clay and rocks, so I ended up tossing the seeds on the ground and covering them with a thin layer of compost, and hoping for the best.

I noticed that the poison ivy plants behind our back fence have started to sprout again. The city came through and mowed the whole area a few months back, but it seems that they didn’t actually do anything to eradicate the plants themselves. I guess we’ll have to do something ourselves. Again. This time I’ll wear full body protective armor.

Some day I would love to have a house with a backyard big enough for me to have a real garden, where I can grow directly in the ground.

TRIMMING THE OLD
I cleaned out the attic, despite the oppressive heat and lack of circulation up there. I really wish that we had a finished attic, but that is not in the cards for us with this house. We do want to add more flooring, though, so that we can have a larger area to store things in. The way it’s configured now, we have pull-down stairs in the ceiling outside of our master bathroom, and the only way you can actually step into the attic is by hoisting yourself up and over an air conditioning pipe that runs to the bedroom. We want to re-route the pipe to run along the other side of the attic entrance, the side that only has a tiny storage area under the eave. Why the contractor just didn’t do it that way in the first place remains a mystery.

Anyway, the cleaning out part. I have been in a mood to throw stuff away lately. We have way too much unneccesary crap. Much to Doc’s relief, I have been restraining myself from tossing out everything we own, but the urge is strong. Mom will arrive in a few weeks in her new truck with a load of items from her house, and we’ll hold a garage sale. I’ve started piling up our own stuff in the garage as well. I now have three paper-boxes of books to sell to Half-Price Books (I’m getting rid of books! Can you believe it?!), and some old dishes and pots and pans and various other old unused things to start tagging. I have a “to sell” box on the bar counter to which I’m gradually adding things from around the house.

When I finished going through all the attic boxes and sorting what to keep and what to get rid of, I was covered in dust and my arms and legs itched like mad. I’m sure that I am now full of tiny fiberglass insulation punctures. I hope that’s not hazardous to my health. Maybe I should have worn a breathing mask.

After two days of 90-degree gardening and going up and down the attic steps a million times, most of the muscles in my body hurt. I think that tonight I’ll have some therapeutic yoga and a nice long herbal soak in the bath.

THINGS THAT REMAIN TO BE DONE

• We need to get some plywood for additional attic flooring. Prometheus is now our transport car for things like this, but it’s going to look pretty strange with plywood tied to the roof.
• We also need to sweep out that attic. It’s crazy dusty in there. Also I’d like to install a fluorescent light to replace the standard bare swinging bulb.
• And of course, reroute the air duct.
• More vegetable containers!
• Kill that poison ivy before it attacks me again.
• Clean and restain deck
• Get new fence
• OK, now this is getting expensive. I’d better quit while I’m ahead, otherwise I’m going to include hardwood flooring and a kitchen remodel on this list.

This is my garden. We don’t actually have any “yard” to speak of in our backyard – the redwood deck you see covers almost the whole yard, and the corner that doesn’t have deck on it has giant overhanging trees that provide 100% shade. So, we can’t have a plant-it-in-the-ground type of garden. On the little table, we have thyme, marjoram, oregano, basil, and sage, as well as a red bell pepper plant and an heirloom tomato “Mr. Stripey” plant. On the deck in the rectangular containers we have bell peppers, “patio” tomatoes (roma sized), and yellow pear tomatoes. That plant is just going crazy producing these amazingly sweet bite sized yellow tomatoes. Almost more than I can eat. (Almost). At the top right is a rosemary plant – the last one remaining from our wedding. Out of the picture to the right is our Satsuma orange tree. I’m completely shocked that I’ve been able to grow anything at all to fruition. Normally I accidentally kill everything.

I have two peppers on this plant, and this one has started to turn red. I’m a little confused by this process. I bought this as a “red bell pepper plant.” The rest of my plants are “green bell pepper plants.” But I always thought that a red bell pepper was just a green bell pepper that had further ripened.

These are two unripened yellow pear tomatoes. They’ll probably turn yellow in about 4-5 days. See how, in the one on the left, it looks like it’s in two sections? Like it has an abdomen and a thorax? Like an insect? This really kind of freaked me out at first. I thought I was growing mutant tomatoes. It turns out that the little “waist”-like midsection fills out as the tomato gets bigger.

Last night I made cheese ravioli (ok, Mr. Sam’s Club made my cheese ravioli) with a sauce of patio tomatoes from my garden, garlic, Vidalia onion, olive oil, white wine, and a mixture of basil, oregano, sage, thyme, and marjoram from my garden. YUM.

i picked the first of my tomatoes from my garden this morning. two yellow pears and a “patio” tomato. karen at work also picked the first of hers this morning. i guess june 20 is the day the tomatoes ripen.

I kill plants. With very few exceptions, plants that come under my care are doomed to suffer a slow death of thirst and neglect. I love plants and would like nothing more than to live in a house surrounded by tall trees and grass and ferns and flowers and fruits and vegetables and bushes and shrubs and hedges and gardens, but it would seriously have to come with a gardener. I really do mean well, but I just suck at caring for them properly.

Whenever I acquire new plants, I’m terribly excited about them for about two weeks, and then one day I forget to water them, and suddenly it’s 3 weeks later and I remember that I have plants to take care of — make that HAD plants to take care of — and I panic and run outside and find their dried brown husks frozen in a sun-crisped rigormortis, their slow suffering and piteous cries for water and TLC stamped into their little shriveled stalks and leaves.

Thank god for automatic sprinkler systems, otherwise my lawn would probably be a wasteland too.

One thing I am proud of: I try to do everything organically, without nasty synthetic chemicals that can hurt me, the vegetation, animals, the air, and groundwater. I do read up a lot on organic fertilizers and pest control, and I have all the necessary ingredients for the garlic-pepper tea and the Garrett Juice fertilizer and the liquid seaweed-insecticidal soap bug killer. I use the bug killer when I see bugs and I attempt to remember (but usually forget) to fertilize monthly. Also, I have a compost pile (ok, it’s really just a heap by the side of the house where I throw scraps and leaves and junk… but it does seem to be working!)

I did not inherit Mom’s fantastic abilities with all forms of vegetation (but I guess if it was between art and horticulture I’m glad I got her art genes instead). She never admits it but she is amazing at growing things. Come to think of it, the only plants I’ve been able to keep alive for a decent period of time are an orange tree she gave me, a houseplant that she sent me for my birthday one year, and a rosemary bush she grew from the table centerpieces at my wedding.

Despite my limitations, I make annual valiant attempts to grow things in pots on my patio. At about 5 p.m. yesterday I got it into my head that I wanted to try growing tomatoes this year. Last time I tried this, I ended up with one edible Roma tomato that was maybe 1″ across.

Clearly, I have no clue what I’m doing.

So now, in big ugly containers on the back deck, are seedlings. I have two Patio cherry tomato plants, two yellow pear tomato plants, and an heirloom variety called Mr. Stripey that I bought mostly because it was called Mr. Stripey.

In another container are some green, yellow, and red bell peppers.

And I have some herbs that Mom sent me a couple of weeks ago… basil, oregano, marjoram, sage, and thyme.

I guess I’m kind of growing a salsa garden. Now all I need are some onions! (one thing that I have successfully grown before).

And — and I have to take pride in the little things here — I remembered to water them this morning before work! Of course, watering the plants, and taking out the trash, and forgetting my work shoes and having to dash back home to get them so I wouldn’t have to wear tennies all day, made me miss my bus this morning. Argh!

I am such a big baby. I went to the dentist yesterday and had my first-ever filling. So much for me with the perfect teeth.

Turns out that my tooth was actually cracked (I got scolded for chewing ice) and a cavity formed in the crack.

A big scoop of topical lidocaine and four shots of novocaine later, I was feeling only a little pain. The sound of that drill is the worst — worse than the needles in my mouth, and worse than the weird feeling of little tiny electric-metallic jolts I kept having in that tooth as she was working. It didn’t exactly hurt, but every time she brought that drill near my mouth I got this awful nervous dreadful feeling.

My face was numb for about 3 hours after that. but only on the left side… and it really was exactly the left side, like she had taken a ruler straight down the middle of my face. It was so weird to drink cold water when I got back to work, because I could only feel it on the right side of my tongue.

Sensation came back halfway through lunch, and with it came a big old headache, a sore jaw and neck, weird pain/nonpain throbbing in my tooth, and a general feeling of strange ickiness.

Today it feels like the insides of my gums were sanded down with coarse grit, and the tooth itself tastes kind of weird and metallic — even though it’s white enamel.

I’m also pissed about the whiteflies in my yard. Garlic and seaweed is not keeping them away. I will try horticultural oil, dishwasher detergent, and yellow sticky traps next.

Leslie found Henry yesterday. She was at an animal shelter in East Dallas. Pongo came home on his own the day before. A dogcatcher saw Leslie’s flyer, recognized Henry running down Abrams, called her by name into his truck, and returned her safe and sound. I figured at least they would stick together while they were out cavorting around town — guess not.