UPDATED: These are the people in my neighborhood

Hardcore gardening post here. Serious, serious gardening. Oh my goodness is there a lot of gardening in this post. Heavens yes. With photographs of my plants taken while they were out growing in my garden (rather than out at WalMart shopping for canned salmon.) Gardening, gardening, gardening. Just dirt and plants and botanical latin laying all over the funka da funky.

UPDATE:
...Gardening, and THIS LINK for all you Mythbuster fans out there.

deeply, profoundly and comprehensively NSFW, btw.

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/23793528.html#cutid1

....because after all, gardening isn't everything. Ahem.



REMEMBER: Perennial means it comes back every year
Annual means that it only lives for one year.

perennial Iris pseudacorus, or yellow ditch iris. Just opened an hour before I took this picture.
Iris pseudacorus tends to be a very small flower on top of a very tall, very leafy plant, but what a lovely small flower it is. This is not something you ever plant unless you really like tall (5 ft!!) green, leafy clumps because thats what this does for most of the year.
It can grow in standing water, where it will spread and live happily for years without any attention whatsoever...freeze solid and come right back like a champ. Or, in other words, this sucker is a bitch to get rid of once it's in, so you want to put it someplace that you can easily get to, so you can stick a shovel in and chop it out when it begins to spread. Yes, CHOP. And yes, SPREAD.
In the garden it is perfectly happy with damp, heavy, neutral-acid soil in partial shade, though, which is where I have it.
Beneath a willow tree.
Which it is out-competing.
Yeah.


perennial Aquilegia 'Barlow' series columbine. This is a columbine that was bred to look up at you, instead of hang downward. The Barlows are doubled, which means that they have twice the number of petals that a columbine usually does. I know I have Nora Barlow, Black Barlow and a couple of others but I can never remember which name goes with which one. Anyway, they're pretty.
The Barlow aq's like partial shade, but will put up with full sun. They want a rich, damp, acid soil.


perennial Papaver orientale, oriental poppy. This is a dwarfed selection and I'll be damned if I can remember the cultivar name. It's like a Prince of Orange that stays short; it only gets about a foot and a half tall. Usually orientals are big, spready, wandy things about 3 feet +. It likes full sun and average soil-heavy, sandy, slightly to the left or right of neutral; it isn't picky. It is also highly invasive if you don't cut off the seedpod before it dries out-those seeds are REALLY lively. You want to underplant it with something that will grow up tall around it, because once the flowers finish the foliage just goes to hell and looks awful. It needs no care whatsoever, and will thrive on neglect for 90 YEARS.


perennial Lychnis flos cuculi Ragged Robin. The pink lacy stuff. Although it looks nice with all the crappy buttercup coming up through it, doesn't it? It gets about 12 inches tall. This is a completely carefree plant. It will seed itself around happily but is easy to take up. It isn't picky about soil, as long as it isn't completely waterlogged, and it's light requirements are pretty easygoing too. It makes a nice filler type flower, running around in between everything else.


flowering tree Cornus kousa in full mature blossom. This is over my Opie dog. The blossoms start small and greenish-white with a red line around the edge of the petals, and gradually change color and size over time, getting larger and darker. It changed to pink this morning (5-28) after the clouds burned off, Mr. C., and right after I took this picture I went inside and heard your sad news. My heart is with you right now. If there is such a place as heaven, then only dogs qualify to get in. Your guys and my Tater man are playing together. And more than likely eating cat crap.

perennial Aquilegia, an open - pollinated mutt. Some of these look upwards, some face down, like the ones in the background there. The solid blue ones that come up in my garden tend to pillar, and get anywhere from one to two feet tall, depending on what they happen to feel like doing or what song is playing on the radio or whatever. These grow in full sun. The spiky thing is its seedpod. The pink thing is my hand.


perennial, native to the northwestern americas Aquilegia canadensis. Years ago I ganked the seeds from out in the woods and threw them in my garden, and it's followed me around ever since. This columbine has a really nice habit; it doesn't pillar so much as it wands gracefully out, the long stems taking random gradual curves. When you run onto it in the shady woods, the effect is that of a small bright bird, like a hummingbird, standing motionless in midair. This can reach 2 1/2 feet tall, although its more common at the 1 ft height. It isn't very floriferous, but the flowers are incredibly striking and the plant itself is very elegant in all its parts. It likes at least half a day of shade, which is why it planted itself near the walls of my house where the afternoon shadow falls.



...another shot of the plant. Theres some blue columbine behind there, and the whitish stuff on the bottom left corner there is Lychnis coronaria Rose Campion, not in bloom yet obviously.

perennial Meconopsis cambrica, Welsh Poppy. Likes damp soil and partial shade, and at least here it seeds itself around happily. This is another plant that began as stolen seeds, this time from a planting in downtown Lynden. Ha!

perennial Aquilegia chrysantha, yellow columbine. This one likes to stay in the shade. It seeds itself rather far away from the parent plant, but once seeded in it lasts for years. It gets quite tall too; up to 3 1/2 feet for me in ideal locations. It has the most lovely, graceful long spurs, like a falling star.


perennial Clematis 'Niobe'. This selection is supposed to be much redder than this, but I suspect that given a different soil and warmer springtime temps the red tones would color up. As it is, it comes very dark for me some years; almost black. That makes me happy.
Clematis wants to have its roots in the shade, but the rest of the plant wants to grow in full sun. You can overplant with something that stays short to achieve this, or set the root mass in beneath a large flat rock with the growth tips just barely sticking out from under the sun side.


A bee's bottom through a Cornus sericea ssp. occidentalis Red Osier dogwood. Yup, I ganked it. Started it from a stolen cutting. This strikes quite readily from cuttings too, so go ahead; grab those shears and head for the creek!
It likes damp soil and shade. The online descriptions call it a shrub, but here at least it grows into a very spready small tree. If you stool it back at the end of the season it shoots back up in the Spring with bright red stems, and this is how it's usually used in a garden setting. I like the tree form better, although its kind of a pain to keep trimmed back. The honeybees are enraptured by this tree. They climb all over the umbels from morning until dark, their legs so full of pollen that they look like they're wearing mukluks, and the whole tree hums.


First rose of the season, opened this morning!
I have no idea what kind of a rose this is. I call it Jackie Kennedy for no particular reason other than I couldn't let it run around without a name, and Jackie Kennedy sounds like a good rosey name. I took it as a cutting from an abandoned homesite where it was holding it's own against a himalayan blackberry. So yes, it's a rampant climber. It grows on its own roots, though, and I've never had much of a problem with black spot, powdery mildew or aphis. Plus, you can ignore it completely-I have it out in the full sun right in the path of the northeaster and in six years its never noticed a thing. The new growth is dark bronze-red, and the flower has no scent, unfortunately. It will repeat in late July.


perennial Sisyrinchium montanum Blue eyed grass
It's really not worth the trouble...she says to herself every year, when it comes up everydamnplace and looks boring. Until the pretty, pretty little blue stars open up. Then it's great.


perennial Frangaria x Pink Panda strawberry. Bulletproof, evergreen, pretty most of the growing season, a great groundcover, not picky about conditions, AND it produces a really tasty, sweet little berry!


perennial Asphodel, Aarons Staff. I've grown this for 16 years, and nothing seems to bother it, except me. Each main crown sends up this one flower spike in May, then that fades and you're left with a nice blue-green spire of long wandy leaves. It pups from the base of the crown, and you can crack those off and stick them in a pot for next year, to start new mother plants. Otherwise you can let the offsets grow and have a clump with taller and shorter spires. It forms a cluster of berries after the flowers finish, and they're pretty lively if you let them mature on the plant and then drop off naturally. It wants moist soil, neutral, full sun.


Sandwort...? I am drawing a complete blank on this, and its really common too. It's a woody little sub-shrub guy used in rock gardens, and it likes dry conditions and full sun. Agh! Anyway, its pretty.

perennial Iris, German Iris, Bearded Iris. Just the plain old iris with the big knobby roots that your grandma grew. This one happens to be a lovely clear blue. Supposedly I have a black one too, 'Interpol', but in five years it's only given me three blossoms, and it isn't out yet anyway.


Again, drawing a blank on the foreground flower. Its the same variety as the other one that I drew a blank on; just a different selection. If someone can identify it, please do! This is driving me nuts. Still, doesn't it look nice in front of the thing with the broad leaves there, heuchera 'Fireglow'? Both of them are dry landers and want full sun; otherwise they arent picky. Off to the left there is a little white tuft of Quails Feather.


Orange: papaver orientale
Pink: centranthus ruber
blue: aquilegia
yellow: crappy buttercup that needs to die
My favorite 'cottage' color combination. The flower colors don't fight with the green of the leaves either; and after all, green IS the most predominant color in the garden, kids.


What a nice little tree! Hello little tree!
My son gave this to me. I have completely forgotten what kind of a little tree it is; but it's about eleven years old. And I could have that wrong.
Once "sittin out" season comes around though it's going to have to vacate that little table there so I have somewhere to set my beer.

UPDATED: Another non-gardening post!

UPDATE: new one up at UJ!
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So I was asked is it worth it. 'It' being all the years of work and crap you go through making a family. It threw me for a loop. I think I ended up talking about compost or something.
Let's give it another try.

'Worth' as it relates to life is a way of thinking that I associate with being a Catholic. We were taught that any particular event in life was a test (and usually sucked), and if you passed it, God rewarded you. Guaranteed. You pay, you get.

Now granted, you could look at parenthood as a trial of endurance and not be far off the beam. You're broke all the time, you spend three years stuck with a short crazy person going through puberty, and then of course there's all the unpaid overtime spent attending those interminable goddamn school programs (oh sweet fuck the CHRISTMAS programs especially; gaaaaaaah!!!) Not to mention losing jobs because your boss just doesn't seen to understand that you can't leave a sick 4-year-old at home by herself, or same being eligible for free school lunches and then finding out that the poor kid's been doing without because of the stigma attached to that; yeah.

Are we having fun yet?

Still, here's the way I see it: In and of itself, no. Parenthood isn't worth it because it isn't a price you pay for something and there is no exchange involved. You don't get a guaranteed reward if you do it well. Most of the time you don't even get noticed. The fact of the matter is, you can raise a kid and make a home and do those things perfectly, and truthfully it doesn't mean a whole fuck of a lot in the universal scheme of things, all that effort and sweat and all those good intentions. It really doesn't. It can, but chance doesn't exactly favor that outcome, either.
True fact.

If parenthood ends up being worth anything, then that will be the direct result of your values and how seriously you take it. In other words, you make it worth something.

So that explains why I fumbled the handoff. You can take the girl out of the church, but once she becomes a nihilist she ends up talking about compost. Or however that goes.
_______________________________


For me, at least, being a parent sucked about half the time. That's the simple unvarnished truth. It wasn't the kid, so much...aside from a few episodes of 'stupid' the kid was pretty excellent. It was the other stuff. Mostly it was the constant terror. I had no idea what I was doing.

The worst part of having a child was the baby years. Of course then it was simply a problem of a baby not being able to express itself in words that raised the frustration level. Once I survived that, the 'kid' part was actually kind of fun a lot of the time. Certainly tolerable if nothing else. And if, like me, you haven't really crossed over into adult mode yourself, it probably was a lot more fun than it would have been otherwise, so there was that too.

The bad part is all the bullshit you have to put up with and all the crap you have to be on your guard about. I know I went head to head with shit on behalf of my family that I would never have put up with for a friend. And you have to win those battles, too. You HAVE to win. You have to go in and risk looking like a hysterical bitch or an idiot, just put the fear and the ego to one side and go deal with the scary nurse or the condescending bank teller or complain to the manager.

It's dealing with incompetence and indifference on the part of teachers, sanctimoniousness on the part of doctors, freakjob parents, attitude from strangers, and worst of all, the people with weird agendas they wanted to foist off in the name of good parenting. (Boy, there's another post right there. ) Religious nuts of every possible stripe come out of the woodwork, and the first thing they target is the kids. Awana, Tiger Cubs, the fricken' Ba'hais for heavens sake, the fundies with their VBS...oh, it's just wonderful. Then there's the media you suddenly have to be hyperaware of...a media which is WAY better at sneaking in and pushing childrens' buttons than it was when we were growing up.

One of my favorite 'screw the parents' ploys is when the fucking PTA decides to have a fund drive and your poor little six year old kid shows up with a sheaf of tickets or overpriced candy they have to sell or they get in trouble, and they're crying, and you realize that the only way that shit ever gets sold is if the parents buy it all because there's no way in fucking hell that you're going to send a six-year-old girl out door to door in this day and age....and you realize that you're being conned.
Oh yeah, that's a barrel of laughs.

Of course there was that whole issue of me not being the most socially well-adjusted person who ever lived, in the beginning (I am of course the very soul of reason now.) Being a chambermaid, no matter how evil, simply does not prepare you to to take care of a little kid; forget that suddenly I also had to be a manager, an agent of the Spanish Inquisition*, a spy, a cop, a public relations officer, a prosecuting attorney, an ambassador, a hostess and a rampaging berserker at a moments notice.

OK fine. The rampaging berserker part came easily. The rest, not so much. **
________________________


So. How did I make it BE worth it? And will there be coffee and donuts afterwards?

I guess first of all, I took it seriously. Dead seriously.
Things were absolutely NOT going to fuck up on my watch.
That attitude right there is what got me through those 18 years.

Second of all, when we made a decision, we always chose quality of our family life over any other consideration; including financial gain. Always.

Thirdly, I got a lot out of being the person whose job it was to teach a new human being the ropes. I really, really liked that. And then seeing that person learn it, and use it? And having it work? That's....shit, that's a big relief if nothing else!

Fourth, I liked my husband. No, seriously, I know plenty of parents for whom that's simply laughable; liking one another. We were able to share responsibility pretty evenly without any ego or entitlement issues involved.

Fifth, I just like being part of a family. That's the way I'm wired. So parenthood didn't seem like this big, onerous imposition because I expected it to be what it was and just dealt with it. In fact, I expected it to be a hell of a lot worse than it turned out to be. When it wasn't, that was pretty cool too!

Sixth, when it did suck, it NEVER SUCKED ONE TENTH AS MUCH AS A TYPICAL DAY IN MY PARENTS HOUSE. And that's sheer circumstance there. Still, it was a huge source of pride for me every single day of those eighteen years. Not even on my worst day did it ever even OCCUR to me to pull any of the sick shit that went on as a matter of daily fact in my family of origin.

Seventh, I never had to make my kid be like me. I saw parents who did this and it was just creepy. When she did something cool, that was her doing it, and I was like 'Wow! That person lives with me!' and was all blown away and impressed. Still am, in fact.

Eighth, I had my own interests. I didn't let being a wife and parent engulf me. I might be having a shit day as a mom, but I could still learn something new or make something nice and at least reassure myself that I wasn't a complete failure.

Being a wife and parent has not been the most personally rewarding thing in my life-working with plants and pursuing my studies and and interests has been just as rewarding. A whole hell of a lot less frightening, at least. That it all turned out well is nice, of course. Still, it could have gone off the goddamn rails so many times, for so many different reasons that I had no control over...yeesh. How much credit can I take for that? None.

I spent eighteen years flying without a net, and I'm glad it's over
________________________________

So. Here I am. And here's what I have, some of which is at least somewhat due to good choices having been made prior...

Once I no longer had that third person in the house, I methodically set out cleaning out the joint top to bottom...and that 'mommy' persona got cleaned out right along with it.
Mommy is done. Mommy is OVAH.

Now that I no longer have to be a good example, I don't even fucking pretend any more. Things that I quit doing or ramped way back on for the sake of being a responsible parent are once again part of my life, like taking recreational drugs and cranking up my music really loud and being really vocal politically and artistically. My kids know me as an adult woman. I'm no longer their boss-fuck that. I'll give you my perspective on things if you ask, but I could give a hoot in hell how you fold your laundry or clean your house or what kind of soap you wash the baby in. Wash it in ketchup. Wash it in ranch dressing.

The time we formerly spent riding herd on the kid we now put into our interests; which, thank God, we HAVE since we didn't play the 'my family is my WHOOOOOOLE LIFE' thing. Let me tell you, sweet, uninterrupted TIME to concentrate and really get into the kind of depth you want to with something, without feeling that your stealing time and attention from your family responsibilities, is EXCELLENT.

Furthermore the sex is so goddamn much better now I cannot tell you. I'm one of those people who gets all squicked out if the dog wanders into the room, right; so having a little kid in the house was really really inhibiting.

That is no longer a factor. At all.

So yeah. Life is good! We have a lot more free time now and money to play! Come over and party some time!

Just, you know...call first.

__________________________________
*which, if you do it right, nobody will expect. their chief element is surprise.

*not that i didn't catch on fast; i did. oh FUCK yes. soon those who would subdue us found themselves consumed. MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA

Quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

-Aw shit, more stuff about plants? Because I know you're going to write more shit about your fucking garden and really, please Nations, enough already. I mean Jesus Christ on a red bicycle please stop with the goddamn gardening posts. Nobody cares. Most of us live in town. We think vegetables come from small steel cylinders, like Martians, and take over small towns in New Jersey. We like to sit on the copy machine at work and take pictures of our butts. That was fun until the glass broke. Then we got fired. But it's OK now, we have another job, and the buzzing sound in our heads is almost indistinguishable from the screaming of the gulls here at the county dump.

-Oh fine. Here. I hope you're happy now. Bitch, bitch bitch.

______________

My husband has made it known that he won't be buying me a motorcycle anytime soon. Hell no, not after this incident.

Now here is the reason I love this man: Despite my ongoing love affair with excessive speed and disaster, apparently he sees no problem with buying me another utility.

The last time I had one of these vehicles I did STUPID shit in it. I broke the law. More accurately I stomped on it and set it on fire and buried it and then dug it up and set it on fire again. I think they actually made some new laws to cover the shit I got away with. How did I get away with it? For the simple reason that I looked like a nice little housewife (ramping over intervening watercourses Dukes of Hazzard stylee while lobbing Molotov cocktails out the side window) and the cops couldn't believe what they were seeing until it was too late to do anything about. That's my theory anyway.

Here's the deal: A utility vehicle is less a small truck than it is essentially half a car, so it's very, very light.
There is no weight on the rear axles to speak of. Even with an average engine it takes very little pressure on the gas from a standing stop to chirp the tires.

Now remove all the extraneous equipment and give that same vehicle a very LARGE engine and it's no longer a question of chirping the tires, it's giving the gas a little rap and sending a tsunami of gravel and chunks of pavement shotgunning out from beneath your smoking rear tires as little fragments of soot float around and the entire car torques 20 degrees out of true and people come out of their houses and

*ahem*

For the same reason the Utility Vehicle is unusually well suited to doing donuts.
Slow vehicles on the highway, like gravel trucks and police officers, are no longer an impediment. The concept of 'time' and 'distance' becomes real fluid. Drifting corners becomes possible. As does getting airborne. On rail crossings. Like the one down near Cherry Point.

And see, you'd think with a little extra weight in the car (say about 70 pounds...about the same as a grade school-aged kid yelling " Do that AGAIN, mom!!!" ) that this shit would be more difficult, but you'd be wrong.

My husband sold my Ranchero to a man who shipped it to Germany. This may have been connected to certain unsubstantiated rumors concerning my driving habits having been passed along by the aforementioned grade school-aged kid.
In any event, he made sure that once it was gone, it was REALLY gone.

I miss it. It was an awesome car. It was flat black and dechromed; had a rubber rake of about 3 1/2 or 4 inches, black tuck and roll upholstery, a tiny little handcuff steering wheel and an accelerator pedal shaped like a foot.
It had an El Toro gas cap.
It had red steels with chrome baby moons.

I still have that accelerator pedal, and I still have that steering wheel.
And now they'll have a new home.

Stay off the roads, folks. Trust me on this one.

__________________________________________


We rolled into Bobs for their Sunday brunch last week and found there ahead of us about 15 Canadian HOG (Harley Owners Group) members, all decked out in their brand-new shiny leather, wearing their HOG rockers, strutting around like banty roosters.

It was...sad.

This is what I continually fail to comprehend:

See, there is nothing particularly 'cool' about being an outlaw biker. Being a biker in general; yes, ok, that's cool. But in general I don't see why, if you are genuinely bad-and I mean, righteous now, not evil- you still feel the overwhelming need to maintain all that constant advertising? "OO, See all my wings? See my spiderweb tattoo? Aren't I scary? Aren't I mean? See my 1% patch? See my pins? See my outlaw rocker? I'm bad, y'all, I mean it. Bad, bad bad. Really really bad. I am. "
Whenever I run onto that I am reminded of those people you see driving cars with about a thousand bumper stickers plastered all over them.
Someone needs a hug.

As far as needing to belong to a club goes; that, I do not get at all. I know plenty of genuinely bad people who did NOT agree to spend two years undergoing various types of ritualized**humiliation, only to earn the 'privilege' of living under someone elses' rules, wearing a brand, and answering to yet another leader in your free time. Do you really need that much supervision?
I mean yeah; I know I do...but I don't fucking volunteer for it.

Anyway, here we were monopolizing the hollandaise sauce looking over at this group of people who are probably the furthest thing from 'outlaw bikers' that one could imagine...happy, functioning Caucasian cogs in the system, all sporting these imitation outlaw patches and wearing leather and none of them with the vaguest clue as to what 'outlaw' means. They obviously think that they are automatically 'bad' because they're wearing this costume they've purchased, though, and this mistaken assumption is causing them to act like total morons.

It dawned on me what this was, finally... the direct, middle-class equivalent of 'Juggalo' . Not only were they not cool, they were trying desperately to be cool by imitating something that's not cool....only to come off even MORE uncool than they were originally.

Anyway, we calmly ate our brunch while they strutted and guffawed.

Then we got on our Victory and did 90 miles like maniacs with no religion.

_______________________



*I have personally experienced 'Red shift'.

**Some of it more than a little abusively homoerotic. I mean come on... jizzing for distance? yeah, that's really....um...outlaw. and you claim you're all straight men, huh? Straight, middle aged men all standing around...seeing how far you...yeah. OK then.

(not that i find anything wrong with that.)


(at all.)



(seriously. i mean it.)





(like, ok if you're one of those really hairy burly type guys, and particularly if you smoke a cigar, right? and you have a lot of friends who are also really hairy burly cigar smokers who wear leather and ride motorcycles, particularly if they have really BIG arms, and say they were all really sweaty because it was a hot day out and they all had to take off their shirts, and maybe even their pants? and one thing lead to another like how it does, and a chalk line got drawn on the pool table....I promise you i would be the LAST PERSON ON EARTH to judge you.)

Mauve Squirrel Delivers Seven Forks!

It pains me to have to break it to you but honestly, my kids are SO MUCH COOLER than your kids.

..no, I don't wanna hear it. Truthfully. I don't. There is no way that your kids could possibly be cooler than my kids. It would be both retarded and terribly sad of you to try and compete by telling me sad, lame little tales of purportedly 'kewl' things your kids have done. Seriously. Unless your kid is Stephen Hawking.

...please don't tell me you actually BOUGHT that wheelchair routine.

1. My daughter has a degree. A non-traditional degree. My daughter is a fricken' STRUCTURAL ENGINEER.
A FRICKEN' one.
I must also point out that she is COOL engineer. She does NOT eat with her mouth open or pick her nose in public. Neither does she collect boogers in a pill bottle or wipe earwax in a big streak on the bathroom wall. No. She is the Dana Scully of engineers....gorgeous, bitchy, mean to parasitic aliens, and MUCH smarter than your daughter.
How cool of an engineer, you ask in a high, piping little whimper?

They used to PAY HER TO SET SHIT ON FIRE.

Now all right. Just stop. Drop what you're doing, now, and stop. Fall down on your knees and thank whatever God you own that you have LIVED TO WITNESS THE EXTRAORDINARY COOLNESS OF MY DAUGHTER.

Do they pay your sad, tepid little daughter to set shit on fire?
They do not. They pay her to sew buttholes on Care Bears.

My daughter knows how to THINK.
FURTHERMORE, my daughter knows pretty much everything about contemporary world politics. More, in fact, than Condoleeza Rice; plus she has a better jawline and would not be caught dead in no stinkin' Dior knockoff pink boucle' jacket. My daughter could kick her ass. In fact my daughter SHOULD kick her ass. My daughter, basically, could straighten the fuck out of this country, square away the national budget AND hand-sew a Log Cabin quilt at the same time.

...the Holy Infant of Prague agrees: "That SSA is A-OK!
incidentally this thing really is full of Chambourd."

In fact-and this has become a problem in recent months-Martha Stewart calls my daughter up and begs her for crafting advice.
Sometimes, Martha cries. It is tragic.

This is because my daughter has great taste. AWESOME taste. The editors of Dwell magazine duck down and hide when my daughter drives past because they know that her taste is so well respected that she could huck like half a melted vanilla ice cream cone at them or like a part of a burger with mustard hanging out and maybe a pickle? And drive away and the cops wouldn't do anything to her.
If I need a second opinion? I go to her. I say "What is this ol bullshit type of situation going on ?" and she give it to me STRAIGHT UP.

...my daughter is cooler than THIS DOG. and this dog, my friends, has an AFRO.

This is an informed woman. You want to know some stuff? Forget it. She knows it already.
Give up. Go home. Go ask your daughter 'Why can't you be more like the SSA? I am so ashamed to know you. No I will not make you a peanut butter sandwich."

You see, my daughter is not merely a gorgeous, international super-smart person, she can also COOK some food. Hell yes. She can just go in the kitchen and as soon as that stove goes on, pilots abandon DEA helicopters to parachute down and eat dinner at her house. Astronauts abandon their missions and drop out the sky for a sanwidge. All the time this happens.

Meanwhile your cut rate ol' daughter is looking at the jar of peanut butter and the table knife and back at the peanut butter and her lower lip is beginning to tremble.

Too many moving parts.


2. My son is SO MUCH COOLER than your so-called sons which are make the laughing so much my face!! HA I say toward your sons!

The dude apprenticed at Full Sail.
Please try and understand. The man is a brewmaster. He knows about HOPS. He makes beer. In fact he just whups up a batch of beer WHENEVER HE FEELS LIKE IT. Just for something to do. Good beer. Rockin' ass beer.

...this is what YOUR son drinks. they put an umbrella in it for him.

Your son cannot make beer. Your son cannot make Koolaid. He doesn't even know the words to the Koolaid song.*

My son has a degree.
My son has a degree in AGRICULTURE.
HE GARDENS FOR A LIVING.
That's right friends and neighbors. He actually scammed a paying job with benefits GROWING PLANTS.
Oh my God! How can you stand the humiliation of living on the same planet as this man, knowing that your progeny are so inferior? Here is how it is. And this will be difficult but pull on your big kid uns and deal with it, because it's like this:

He could have been paid to make beer, or paid to garden.

Please. The coolness is blinding me here. Frost is forming. This is like minus 40-below coolness here.
God it must suck to be you.

Does your son grow stuff? Pfft. Moss under his balls, maybe.

...this is what YOUR son wore last Halloween. he told people he was a radio telescope.

Yes, I'm afraid YOUR SON is a dork.
Feel my pity. *snoooork* Waves and waves of extreme pity rolling your way like the vast moon-driven breakers on a tempestuous berg-strewn arctic sea full of narwhals with big pointy things sticking up out of their heads going 'Woooooo' like they do.
Thats right.

As if this were not extreme liquid nitrogenlike coolness enow, my son was a RODEO RIDER. Mercy yes. Testify: He subdued WILD IRRITABLE ANIMALS in a WESTERN SETTING is what I am trying to convey to you here, motherfucker.
Oh yes.
Yes.
Cows FEAR MY SON.

Cows taunt your son.

Your son carries a big paper bag in his car so that whenever he has to go by some cows he can put it over his head so that he does not have to endure their cruel mockery. You ever wondered about that big paper sack he carries in his Gremlin? Now you know.

...this is the wallpaper on your sons computer. do you know why? because cows hacked your sons computer. and now he can't get it to go away.

You really have to ask yourself why you even bothered to procreate. Lotta wasted effort, wasn't it. And now you have nothing to show for it but some stained sheets, crushing debt and a broken heart.

My DNA has prevailed.
FUCK YES!
Look on my kids, ye mighty, and despair.






__________________________________
* " Oh yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah-"
...thats it. those are the lyrics. thats how the Koolaid song goes.
you see how incredibly sad and lame your son is? return him and get your money back; and if the fly problem in your home ramps back up use it to buy a frog. don't even bother to give it a name.

Ecotopian Hippie Rant!

Nature is good.

It is also bigger than you, so it is incumbent upon you to learn about it, rather than for it to bend to your will....because your shit will get smacked down if you try it that way; witness the 20th century for examples of that. The life of the earth is going to prevail no matter what we as humans do to try and subdue it. If it goes, it all goes. Us along with it. We will peter out to one long, gradual whine that trails off into silence and the stars will still turn overhead and the sun will still shine on whatever dust is left.

We are animals on the Earth and we are meant to live here. The natural world is not an inimical force to be defeated. We are part of it. And it is GOOD to be a part of it. Living so removed from the life of the earth that you have to make a special arrangement to see a cow being milked is not only pathetic, its not healthy, or good for your psyche or any other part of you. I mean this seriously. It is genuinely bad for people, for their minds, for their physical selves and emotional selves, to live a completely technological, urbanized, civilized existence. Cities and technology are not our habitat.

The simple proof of that is this: You take any healthy organism and you make it live in an unnatural environment where all of its functions are subverted, redirected or completely forbidden and you destroy all the higher functioning of that organism.

You turn it into LIVESTOCK.

Do you pride yourself on being the 'compleat urbanite'?

Congratulations. Say 'baaaaaaa'.

When people live that way, they begin to go crazy, and I mean crazy as a group, too.

I'm completely serious here. This is why I had to get out of the city. It was like I gradually woke up and realized that I was in the nightmare. I gradually became aware of a fundamental, basic wrongness all around me, like a heavy, hopeless fog weighing down on everything, driving everyone to their knees. I realized that it was because I was, in essence, living in the jaws of a trap... in a place where I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO maintain a standard of living apart from the prosthesis; the money economy, the city, the androcentric system.

That is simply not how we are meant to live on this planet. It just isn't.

Not that I'm all off the grid here, or that I'd even want to be. (Fine, 'now'. I used to hold that as an ideal, but as age has overtaken me I really appreciate things like electricity and indoor plumbing.) Still, if there were a way to exist off the grid and not live in a state of squalor and constant mindless labor, then I'd do it. I don't believe humans are meant to be slaves to the natural environment any more than I think they should be slaves to technology. I do think that we've completely missed many opportunities where we could have developed ways to use the world as a tool instead of a weapon to dominate others. And so I try, in my limited way, to live a kind of life that works in some kind of harmony with the natural world, that keeps me free and keeps my neighbors free as well. This is how I have to live. This is how I'm doing my revolution.

Industrialized society isn't all shit. Still, I am hoping that industrialized society is a kind of a really, really bad puberty that we are going through as a species. There are going to be lots of fuck-ups and irreparable mistakes but eventually, maybe in centuries from now, we will outgrow it; learn how to do things in a more rational, less destructive way, and actually mature as a species. Thats my hope. I don't think it's too pie in the sky, either....after all, we no longer have to run around naked stealing dead shit from hyenas, or sacrifice humans to ensure that spring comes again. We've actually made SOME progress. We have science-basic observation, experiment, repetition and documentation, to thank for it...which we thought up on our own lonesomes, I might add.

Truthfully, I think that the biggest leap ahead will come once we outgrow the need for magic and organized religion, and leave them behind like the crude broken tools that they are. We'll all move ahead to a better place as a people. I really do believe that.

Until then I will probably have a lot of extra pumpkins and garlic and beans and stuff this year, so if you want some stop on by.

UPDATED: This is pretty much how my entire life has been, too.

So I woke up this morning, and I looked over, and there was a starling perched on the shade of my bedside lamp looking at me.

Yeah.
______________________________
UPDATE:
And now sparrows are flying in the kitchen door and landing on my head.

Yes, a sparrow just came in, while I was bent over the sink doing a nasal irrigation with salt water, no less?
And landed on my head.

I can't even irrigate my damn nose without birds watching me now.

(My daughter claims that they are in little bird film school and they're doing a little bird documentary on me.)

Simply excellent.

Fun With Protein

Thank you everyone for your kind and encouraging words as I lay upon my bed of sickness and pain. You will be spared the wrath of Kali for seven lifetimes. XX!
This one goes out in particular to Ziggy.
_________________

Yesterday about 3:pm
Decide to make a loaf of bread

I've been cooking all day by this point, so the decision to bake some bread isn't necessarily a bolt from the blue. So far I've:
- Clamped raw beef bones in the bench vise and sawed them into pieces with a hacksaw

...just the cook

-Browned same
-cracked beer 1
-Prepped and put 5 gallons of brown stock on the fire, to go all day and night
-Made a Greek salad
-cracked beer 2
-Harvested mint, sage, oregano, rosemary, parsley, and thyme IN THE RAIN, snuffling and shivering like Little Dorrit
-Made ground lamb with shallot and mint using a handcrank grinder
-Broken down and sterilized handcrank grinder parts in oven
-Made spiced rice
-cracked beer 3

...because a robot told me to. thats my story and i'm sticking to it.

-Set same aside to dry a bit
-Mixed rice with lamb to make dolmathes filling and put up in fridge to get good
-cracked another beer
-Put beans to soak for refries
-warmed yogurt, egg and evaporated milk for bread
-cracked beer 4 or 5 (counts empties)

Lets recap, shall we? So then...I am lit, I have a cold, the weather sucks and I am having one of those 'idle hands=devils workshop' type afternoons...hey, sure, why not bake a loaf of bread? Whats a little more fermentation going to hurt?

-Crack beer 4 (recounts empties)
-Make dough
-Knead
-Grease the bowls
-Warm the oven
-Pop the dough in the warm oven and set the timer for an hour.
-Crack a beer (#4)

-Hit the sinus spray.
-Watch a couple of episodes of Crossing Jordan.
-Look up plants online.
-Crack another beer. Or no wait, still working on beer #4 at this point. Or something.
-Look up fabled recipe for Tuscan elderberry blossom bread (I just bought a sambucus nigra.) -Fail to find.
-Find instead recipe for deep-fried elderberry blossoms. Consider making it.
-Bookmark site.


The timer goes off.

Why in fuck have I set the timer?

-Check oven.

Oh yeah, dough!

-I look at the dough. It is flat.

I forgot to add yeast.

-The obvious solution to which seems to be to put the dough to one side and make fajitas.



10:00 next morning.

-Cook 1 gallon of refried beans in the crockpot. ...delicious beanal goodness; the heart and soul of the burrito: natures most perfect food

Periodically it blurps over. Go through five dishtowels wiping up bean blurp.

-Find cold dough. On a whim decide to make a couple of tortillas.

They aren't bad at all. I mean, they're lousy tortillas; what I end up with are hot frisbees of death that weigh about a pound each, right?

...whirling doohickie of doom! twirling surfboard of death! circular pancake of....aw, fuck it.

- but they taste awesome.

Hmm. What would Opie do?

-Instead of eating cat crap, I decide to try and make it back into bread dough. Making it up as I go along Calling into play the hard-won fruits of scientific research, I put the remaining dough in a bowl and tear it into a few pieces, add a scant cup of warm water and sprinkle some yeast and flour over the top. Then I start mushing it all around with my fingers....he wants me. oh yeah.

I mush and mush and mush until the dough is...not a batter, quite...but just kind of uniformly mushy. As I'm mushing I'm also casting on flour in random handfulls. I fold in flour until I have a regular bread dough again, and I knead that in kind of a gingerly fashion for awhile until it feels like it's done. Now I am letting it rise again.

Somewhat later
-Check dough. It actually seems to be rising.
-Celebrate by making 2 gallons of marinara.

...you know you need to rub this all over your whole body. and your car.

-Take brown stock off fire and strain. (Yeah, it's been going all this whole time.)

-Dump the strainings out by the driveway for the neighbors cats to choke on eat....heeeeeeeeeeeeere kitty kitty kitty...

-Reduce brown stock by 1/2 and set on washing machine.

...what? the utility room is nice and chilly so the fat can rise up to the top. them i skim it off in floes and huck it to the girldog! it's brown underneath. the stock, not the girldog. stay with me.

-Do four sinkloads of dishes
-Put the dough in to bake at 400.
-Forget to set timer; remember a couple of minutes (?) later and set it. So, 400 for....about....15 minutes or so; then I'll check and see what it looks like and then maybe I'll let it go another 15 minutes or so. I might spray it with water to make the crust thick. I haven't decided yet. If it cracks I definitely won't spray it.
I bet it cracks.
This is how science operates. Really. It is.

12:43
I'll be DAMNED.
Look at this sapsucker:

...BEEYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTIFUL!!!

Here's the other side:

...UM.....YEAH....ok. yeah.

Yeah, we had a blowout. Some of the protein strands gave way under force of the steam. But look! It's all foofy! IT ROSE!
IT MADE A BREADLIKE OBJECT!
I HAVE MADE A BREADLIKE OBJECT!!!
I can hardly wait for it to cool off so I can see how the inside turned out. HURRY UP AND COOL OFF HURRY HURRY HURRY.

-Refries finished
-Refries blended and set aside in little containers to cool.
-Marinara finished and set aside to cool
-I got tired of waiting for everything to cool off and so I have put to use my SUPER SECRET KITCHEN HELPER:

...do you think you could buy a little fan today that would last over 60 years??

...a nice big trivet grille and a little office fan from about 1945-50 or so. Seriously, this little fan was a stroke of genius on my part . I've been using it for over 20 years now. You just plug it in and it goes. This is how I dry my dishes; I just put the drainer in front of it and turn the little fan on them. But at the mo it's busy fooing refreshing breezes upon on my bread and the marinara. MULTITASKING: THATS JUST HOW I ROLL.
-Marinara is cooled off and put into containers

-The bread is all cooled off! And here's the inside! ...terminally cool, hot rocking santoku knife by HENCKELS which is one million times of the earth and sun and moon AND the whole universe AND eternity better than your lame old buttwipey knife so HA.

Incidentally, this is exactly the type of knife NOT to use when you slice bread; it tears the fluff. Like this did.

How does the bread taste? It tastes pretty damn good, Paco.

Victory from the jaws of defeat!!!

DAMN I'M GOOD.

you know I love you

...all, deeply and unreasonably.

But I have a cold ib by doze. I feel like shit.

*snuuuuurk*

Red Vole Family Planning Active!!

I have questions about natural history, kids:

1. Are spiders clean?
Here's the backstory on that one. Last week I was up late reading when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something out rambling around on the carpet. When I moved, it went under the couch. I thought it was a mouse. It was not a mouse. When it rambled out again I saw that it was a bigass honkin funnel spider. (Incidentally, funnel spiders only have two speeds: full stop, and deedledeedledeedledeedledeedledeedle. )
I finished my glass of water and popped the glass over him so he wouldn't run around up on my face in the middle of the night; which if you don't take proper precautions they totally will do. If you see a spider late at night and you don't stick a waterglass over it, three hours later you'll be asleep and they'll be right on your face with a little spider can of spray paint tagging the crap out of you, looking up your nose and yelling stuff and then running to the other nostril to listen to the echo. Spiders will mess with you like that.

The next day I took him outside and let him go where he could funnel away to his little hearts content. Meanwhile I was left with an empty glass in my hand and the question: If I was to fill this glass with water and drink the water, would I come down with some kind of horrible spider-bourne disease?

Well? Spiders strike me as a pretty clean animal; you never see them clustering around dog crap or hauling old burger wrappers around. Then again, they do eat flies, which are filthy, and bees, which have venom. And maybe this venom and stuff seeps into their little spider selves and turns them into little 8 legged bags of pestilence. This was a pretty substantially sized spider too; like I said, I thought it was a mouse at first. I don't know. I got a clean glass out of the cupboard anyway.


2. Platypus...oids. Need the info. Like, what is the collective noun, for starters.
a. Are they nice?
If you ran onto one while you were out popping for bass or whatever, would it attack you? And would you be too busy laughing to defend yourself while they tunneled in through your abdominal wall and started gnawing on your lungs? Because they kind of look like something that might do that. They do.
b. Do they make a noise?
It would tickle my fancy if they quacked. That would be so awesome. But it would also be cool if they barked like a dog, too.
c. Could you have one for a pet?
Because I would own one. Oh hell yeah. I would take it on walks, and I would tote it around in a carrybag when it got tired. It could ramble around my house on its little stubby legs, wagging its flappy tail, barking and quacking. I would make it a nice pond out in the back yard . I would name it 'Howard'.

And yes I know they have a poison spur on their back legs. I don't necessarily see that as a drawback. "Do I think Christ ever walked the Americas? Here, hold Howard while I mull that one over."

3. Wild Hedgehogs.
a. Can you just go outside and pick one up off the ground like a baseball? You see naturalists doing this all the time in television shows.
b. Are they nice?
c. Could you have one for a pet?
d. If you pick up an adult hedgehog, do the spines come out and stick in you like a porcupines?Because that would suck. Bigtime.

Seriously, folks, this stuff bothers me. (I used to worry about ducks' feet getting cold in winter. Oh, the SSA will fill you in AT LENGTH about that one.) I've gone so far as to look all this up on the Innerknot and there is Jack Shit out there. This is the kind of thing that people need to know, though! What if you went out and, like, saw a hedgehog and thought 'Well, I'll just pick him up' and it leaped up and stuck on your face and laid eggs down your esophagus? Or you drank out of a glass that spiders had been yippy-yodelling around in and you croaked off horribly and nobody knew why? And then they drank out of the same glass and WHAMMO the same thing happened? This could be happening every day! Similarly, your platypus might have really bad traits that might make it an unsuitable pet. Maybe it would lift its platyleg on the furniture or play in the toilet or make long distance calls. People need to know.
I NEED TO KNOW.

8 faks about Nietzsche, one of which is a fake fak.

TIM FOOTMAN hit me for this one.
Go, read, worship. The man is GOOD. He also looks like Buddy Holly in certain lights.

And FOR SHITSAKES PEOPLE TRY AND TAKE YOUR MEDICATION FIRST. Every single time I give out a link for this mans blog all the goddamn crazies come out of the woodwork and go harrass him. The man is a serious writer, ok? If you want to say stupid shit say it here; because chances are if you're too dim to get Footman then you won't get it when I subject you to cruel mockery and sarcasm and I always get a big kick out of that. OK? We straight?

This is a meme. A meme is actually supposed to be a self-replicating thoughtform. An internet meme is more along the lines of a chain letter or one of those folklore things that get passed around at offices...like, the picture of the frog sitting at his desk looking disgusted with the saying "I'm so happy here I could just SHIT" captioning it? Or the one where it's a whole list of ways that the word 'fuck' can be used? Like, for instance, it says 'NAUTICAL USAGE: 'Fuck the Admiral'

Oh ha! Ha ha ha! Fuck the Admiral! Get it? See, because an admiral is nautical...?

Yeah.

__________________________________


1. Nietzsche was a philosopher. Except other philosophers of the time thought he really wasn't much of a philosopher. Or, more like, they thought he was OK at coming up with philosophies, he just didn't express them in the approved philosophical format. My question is: Why should we care?
See, that was a pretty philosophical statement right there. Was it Nietzscheian? The fuck do I know? My knowledge of Nietzche is right on a par with my knowledge of gas phase ion chemistry. Actually no, thats a lie; I picked up a copy of 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' back around 1971...and found myself so laughably out of my depth that I just put that bad boy down and backed away slowly. I mean, at that point I'd just barely made it through Thoreau without putting my head through a plate glass window. You know, like that chick in 'The Stand'?

2. There are no pictures of Nietzche wearing a ladies' dress on the Internet. There are a couple of him wearing a Superman outfit. Now thats just dumb. Geezly Christmas people, 'Ubermensch' doesn't mean 'Superman'. It refers to 'higher' or transcendent' man, or more specifically a higher or more transcendent human nature that mankind should strive for in the absence of a God. Incidentally Hitler can go fuck himself.

3. Nietzsche once asked Richard Wagner to buy two pairs of silk underpants for him. Wagner was that guy who wrote that 'Hi ya tee yah!' Valkyries thing? The Ring of the Niblet Corn? With the Rhinemaidens and the evil dwarf and shit, and you have to take four separate evenings out of your life just to see the whole thing and it's all singing in German? That guy. And if you go by that I guess he does seem like the kind of guy who knew his way around a pair of silk underpants.

4. Nietzsche liked playing the violin and smoking a large, foul pipe, which he frequently loaded from a cache of rough shag stored in the toe of an oriental slipper on the mantlepiece. Many were the evenings when I crouched furtively behind some second rate novel, wincing at the alarming screeches and fantastic glissandoes of -one could scarcely call it 'music' -which issued from the tormented strings of his violin, while clouds of foul smoke blued the atmosphere around his head.

5. Nietzsche might have been gay. Or not. Nobody really knows what he was tapping. It is a mystery, like Area 51. When he finally went round the bend and ended up in an asylum Wagner wrote a letter to his doctor and told him that the reason that Nietzsche was crazy was because he jacked off too much. This does little to clarify the issue of Nietzsche's sexuality although it may point toward a preoccupation with World of Warcraft on the part of Nietzsche, or lingering bad feeling about the whole 'pick me out a nice pair of silk underpants, Rick' thing on the part of Wagner.

6. Nietzsche wrote a lot of books, and he read a lot of books. He liked Machiavelli and Burckhardt, and I like Machiavelli and Burckhardt! That means I'm a lot like Nietzsche, I guess!

7. Nobody really knows how to pronounce 'Nietzsche '. Nobody knew how to pronounce MY maiden name either. See? The parallels are mounting up!

8. Nietzsche comes up a lot on Myspace and Livejournal sites where the person quoting him (typically 'What does not kill me makes me stronger') professes an interest in BDSM. He is also mentioned frequently by atheists and Goth kids in Europe. This guy likes him, for example. Some of his pictures are worth enlarging. I like the one where he's wearing a pair of black socks and not a whole lot of anything else.

ok fine. this is what i've been doing.

...by the way, Blogger is being a roly-poly poop butt lately, isn't it?
________________________________
This is what I have been doing since about the 20th of last month!


Here is my shed. See the sophisticated lighting system in the shed. This is what happens to lamps that have been bad.
There are no robots inside the shed.
It is sad.



See the front bed. See the dirt. Wow, dirt! It is soil.
Is that a tricycle in the front bed? Yes! Yes, it is a tricycle! A tricycle fastened to a buried cinderblock with a logging chain!

See the flowers! They are red! They are black! They are Primula 'Velvet Moon'!!!
They are in a cooking pot! That is a very funny place for a flower to be!
The cooking pot came from the dump.
The creepy greasy man who ran the dump traded it for the opportunity to frolic around in the garbage I was hauling.
EEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW.

See the funny plants! They are called 'sedums'. They are a kind of cactus!
They grow in phones and old cooking pots. Really. Robots plant them there.

The dead weeds are on the grass. They are dead. DIE WEEDS DIE. I am laughing.
This area took me 4 hours to weed! This one area! It is a small, small area.
800 million bazillion, two hundred thousand three squillion and seven weeds, and five garden plants were in this area.
I am laughing at the dead weeds! Hahahahahahahahaha!

I am beginning to sound a little hysterical.


See the species tulips! They are red, yellow and black. They are short. They are little. I love them REAL GOOD.
This is the mommy tulip of all the tulips in every garden in the world. Tulipa Speciosa. That is Latin. Latin is a dead language. That means that only zombies speak it.

See the artemesia! It is pretty.
It is also an ingredient in a bad drink that can make you very dizzy. It is DRUGS.
Only bad people take drugs. Drugs are bad. Some drugs come from plants. Thujone is a bad drug. It comes from plants.
This is where I always find Toulouse Lautrec passed out. I call the policeman, and he takes him away. Bad, bad Toulouse Lautrec, the drug taking passer outer man.

What a nice tree! The nice tree is small. The nice tree is healthy!
The nice tree is made of small smelly dog and human birthing waste!
Hippies fear it.


Look, look! See the pots! See the plants! See the pots and plants!
See, Tommy? See, Mary? See the pots and plants? There are many pots and plants!

Look! See? More! More pots and plants! See the many pots and plants?
I told your juvenile shit there were many pots and plants! Don't be calling me a liar, Tommy! You either, Mary!
I made the medium!
I sifted the compost!
I dug the soil!
I weeded the overwintered plants!
I inspected the roots!
I market trimmed!
I moved plants up to the next larger size!
I watered!
I staked!
I rested over!
I set out!
Don't come up in my goddamn face and tell me 'OO, that doesn't look like very many to me', you little shitholes! I know who your real daddy is!


A baby plant starts from a seed. It is called a 'seedling'.
Here are baby squash, beans and peas. The seeds came from vegetables. I saved the seeds over winter and kept them safe. Then I planted them in dirt. They are small!

See the baby seedlings? These are baby tomato plants. Someday they will grow tomato fruits. They are good to eat.
Big, medium and small, red and yellow tomatoes. They all start with a tiny seed.
Seeds that I saved over the winter from other tomato plants that I grew from seeds that I saved over the winter before that. And before that, and before that. And so forth.
It is trippy.


These are seedling sunflower plants. You can see the sunflower seed still stuck to the tiny leaves. These baby leaves are called 'cotyledons'.
I bought these seeds from the store. They are for fancy sunflowers; red, black and striped! Last year I let the poor birds eat all my sunflower seeds because it was cold. I am a big sappy dork like that.

These are weeds. Weeds are bad. Weeds need to die. This is what every single inch of every single one of my beds looked like a couple of weeks back. This is what happens when you get very sick and are not able to take care of your garden. Weeds take over.
This is why I have not been blogging. I have been gardening. I have been killing weeds. DIE WEEDS DIE SCREAMING IN TORMENT UP SATANS BUTTHOLE EVIL SMELLY CRAPPY WEEDS DIE DIE DIE

That is what all these beds looked like. Every single one. In the front yard, and in the back yard too.

See FirstNations backyard? There are raised beds!
They are for growing vegetable plants. They were full of weed plants.
I KILLED THE WEED PLANTS.
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Here are some more raised beds. I have nine. Nine is a lot.
Oh, and once I weeded these, I had to cultivate the soil, too. And repair the boards. And sort through the beds where the strawberries and herbs and the asparagus grow permanently and put compost on them. Compost that I had to screen and haul.
By the way; I planted everything you see in these last two pictures, except for the grass.
Yes, I did.

See the front yard? This is the northeast side of it! I planted everything in this picture that you can see except for the tallest evergreen tree. And the goddamn trees in the background there; geeze.
I weeded it all too.
Yes I did.
I kick ass.



Same here. Only the weeping alder was already there. I still had to weed the bastard though, didn't I? And I'll be trimming it up pretty soon too. But everything else? I planted.
Except for the grass.
Oh, and guess what? I made all those beds. Me. Alone. No help. Eleven years ago I cut the turf and I dug down all the way to the substrate and backfilled with compost and chopped in more compost when I re-filled them and planned the plantings and hauled stone and

...you get the picture?

Now. Are you gonna bitch about how you had to have a bunch of reruns? Are you going to say 'Waa waa waa, if I don't get my full ration of new new new I get all constipated and grouchy and bitch and waa like a big rashy baby'?
Because you can get down on all fours and kiss my flat red ass, Paco.
I am not playing.
YOU SHOULD THANK ME FOR EVERY BREATH OF CLEAN OXYGEN YOU TAKE! OH YES YOU SHOULD! IF IT WASN'T FOR MY PLANTS AND MY GARDEN YOUR WRETCHED SHIT WOULD CHOKE OFF AND DIE AND EVERYTHING WOULD JUST GO RIGHT TO HELL, BUCKWHEAT!
YEAH THATS RIGHT!
WORSHIP ME!!!





So, um yeah. That's what I've been doing for the last coupla few weeks.