Autumn

Canon Fire

I treated myself to a new camera earlier this week. I haven't had one of my own in years.

The Nikon was Peter's, and I encouraged him to take it with him when he left. When we met, he'd just decided to give up being a photographer in favor of a more practical field of study. Business economics is about as far away from the creative arts as you can get.

Over the years, I'd try to get him to pick the camera up and take pictures of anything. Everything. Just shoot. "It doesn't even cost money anymore, not like when we were kids and we had to buy film and paper and chemicals. Just go out there and press the shutter a few dozen times. See what happens!"

He couldn't do it, though. He had the photographer's version of writer's block. We'd go into the City for the day, and he'd take maybe half a dozen shots, then put the camera back in the bag. He just didn't feel it anymore. He loved being an artist, but he denied that part of himself for so long that I don't think he remembered what that passion felt like anymore. I sent the camera away with him in the hope that he'd get it back. I still hope for that for him.

The first thing I did after I unpacked my new Canon was race outside to get a good picture of the Molly Flowers. My phone camera can't capture red yarns or pink flowers without making them look like they're florescing, so I haven't been able to share them before now. They make me think of her. They make me happy.

Burnt Chocolate

Chocolate Cosmos

One year ago today, I was up in Seattle, alone in a bar at the Sheraton, getting very, very drunk.

I'm still wrapping my head around how much had happened by that point last year, and how much has happened since.

So much has changed in my life. I've changed so much. Most of these things, for example, aren't true anymore. I wear skirts most of the time now. I paint my nails. My hair is longer than it's been since early in college; the Execu-Bob is a thing of the past. More than that, I felt like I knew exactly who I was back then. I'm not so sure of that now.

At least there is one constant about me, one thing that never wavers. I don't remember to water plants. Not long after I took the above picture, that chocolate cosmos suffered a fatal blow. I moved it to a sunnier spot on the deck, because it was getting powdery mildew. I then forgot to water it for the three hottest days in August. Maybe it'll come back next spring.

Stretching Toward the Sun

Someday, this little sprout is going to grow into a beautiful Mexican dayflower. I can't wait to see it. But, similar to how I can bring springtime to early February by knitting a hat, I'm also able to bring freezing rain to the region by planting seeds. It's going to be cold and damp for at least the next week.

Hang on, little seedling! I'm pretty sure that it'll warm up again as soon as I'm able to resume knitting.

(What's the Story) Morning Glory?

My backyard here at the new house, which will continue to be the new house for another five years, at which point it will have been our house longer than the old house and will lose the modifier, is a wild and unstructured place. Accountant Boy rebuilt one-fourth of the deck's total surface a couple of months ago, but the rest of it is still unstable, one heavy foot away from catastrophe. We haven't taken the time to figure out the irrigation back there, so some things are overwatered and some are dying from a lack of it. We bought some Japanese maples at Costco early last spring. They're still in nursery pots. We like to say that we're pacing ourselves.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked out there at the vine that I couldn't remember planting and saw that thing. I remember throwing some morning glory seeds in the ground, but it's been a while, at least a couple of years. When a leafy vine cropped up around a withering rudebeckia, I assumed it was a stowaway from the nursery. It didn't bloom for eighteen months, but it didn't die over the winter, even with the snow. Tough plant. And now it's blooming, which is amazing given that we don't water it and it's living in the notoriously crappy Pleasant Hill soil.


Everything in the ground went wild this summer. This is the cosmos that we grew from seed. See what looks like a sapling trunk in the picture, near the plastic Holstein's ass? It's actually a cosmos stem. Yes, these are the same cosmos that you buy in 6-packs at Home Depot. Mine grew six feet tall.

It may not be formal, or purposeful. It's not the garden I had at the old house, that's for sure. Back then, we designed everything, planted that yard from flat dirt, knew the botanical and common name of everything in the ground. I planned very little of what's growing in either the back or the front yards here. We simply threw stuff into the earth and hoped for the best. If it perseveres, we're happy. If it thrives, we're surprised. It has been a surprising few weeks. It's wild. I love it.


Work continues on Juliet. I'm finally down to the lace portion. What I neglected to mention last time was that I'm knitting it at the wrong gauge. Yes, I did do a gauge swatch, but I did it not long after I got the O.K. to lightly use my pinkie, and while my thumb was still in a brace for twenty-three hours a day. I thought that, as it was just knitting, no purling for the first third of the project, it wouldn't be a problem. My tension couldn't be that much more loose, right? Heh. I like it at this gauge, but I'm knitting it as a large so that I can get a small/medium, so it's taking a little while. The Theraputty is in the picture for color adjustment. My phone camera couldn't get the color right without it.

Why the phone camera? Wasn't I just whining about how I don't take out my "real" cameras anymore? For some reason, the lighting in my office and the processor in my Sony don't get along. None of the white balance settings work, even with helpful color contrast object thrown into the mix. My phone, on the other hand, takes wonderful pictures at my desk, with clean, accurate white balance and brightness. My phone won out in the morning glory pictures as well. I took shots with both, but the one above was the most true to life. The big Nikon would more than likely best both of them, but that defeats the purpose of the kind of spur-of-the-moment photography I like to do. For now, the phone wins.

Nothing But Flowers

We have a bad habit, Accountant Boy and I. We buy plants on a whim, then we leave them too long in whatever pot they came in. When it finally becomes apparent that the plants are days, maybe hours away from their last, unrecoverable wilt, we throw them in the ground and hope for the best. This plant falls into the "Oh my God! It LIVED!" category. When my trainer, we'll call her The Amazon, got married, she had hydrangeas on all of the tables at the reception. At the end of the night, those of us milling about had these centerpieces thrust at us. I don't know anything about hydrangeas, so I kept it in a nursery pot for the first few months, and when all of its leaves turned black and dropped, I felt guilty and sad. I left the plant in a corner of the patio and tried to ignore it. When the weather warmed, the plant leafed out again. "Oh my God! It LIVED! Throw it in a bigger pot! HURRY!"

I asked Ron the Gardener about it, and he said, "Wants to be in the ground. They get big." I couldn't figure out if "they get big" was supposed to encourage or deter me. He's a laconic fellow, Ron the Gardener.

"Uh, how about out front? Would it be happy out there? I don't want to put it out there and watch it die, because that's totally demoralizing to see that happen every day, so, you know, is that a good idea? Because this plant's kind of sentimentally special to me, and I want to make sure I don't do something stupid with it."

"Yep. Next week." Like I said, laconic.

It seems really happy in its new spot, so I think we made the right choice. It almost looks like we planned it that way.


Nearby, I panic-planted my Mexican dayflowers. Is that the most beautiful blue flower you've ever seen? Each flower only lasts a day, hence the name, but every day there's a new one. The flowers spring out of a single pod, one after the other, like a shark tooth rotating forward as the tooth in front of it falls out. I bought three of these plants at Home Depot a few years ago, and they've been in the ground, in three pots, in one small pot, and now back in the ground again. I had no idea what they were when I bought them, just that they looked like little corn plants. It's my other bad plant habit - I pick the weirdest, scrubbiest looking plants from the back shelf in the far corner of the garden center. My yard is the planted equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.

Guess what I did over the weekend? I finished Cobweb! Where are the pictures, you might ask? Fair question. I haven't taken any, because I can't decide if I really and truly am finished. See, there's this whole issue with me making it a tad too wide at the bottom, which makes it perfect for a wrap sweater, which it's not supposed to be, but certainly could be if I wanted to make ties or figure out how to fasten it. Also, after a couple of hours of waffling on the edging and getting a few inches into crocheting it each time, I still haven't decided if a scalloped edge is the way to go. Plain edge is looking better by the moment. So it's not as simple as saying it's done, because I haven't stopped fiddling with it yet.


Here's where it was a week ago. I finished it over the weekend, thanks largely to Accountant Boy, who set me up on the back patio with a glass of wine and my knitting while he did all of the nagging, unfinished yard work. He's the coolest.

The Mayor of Shark City

Today is The Engineer's birthday.

******

You know that scene in 'Jaws', the one where the shark's just eaten the boater, and Brody's kid's in the hospital in shock, and Mayor Vaughn's wandering around muttering, "...August...we can still save August...", and Brody says, "August? Look around you, Larry! You're the mayor of shark city!", but it's clear that Vaughn's mind isn't operating completely on this plain of consciousness, and that he's obsessing over the details of an unobtainable goal, so much so that his words seem like non-sequiters? I've turned into Mayor Vaughn, or a combination of Mayor Vaughn, the Hybrid from 'Battlestar Galactic' and Donatella with her pashminas.

I've got this huge thing coming up at work, big thing, has to be done by the end of the week or the labors of the entire company will be for naught. I don't have the sole power to make this thing work, but I'm solely responsible if it doesn't. It's a lot of pressure.

So last night, Accountant Boy comes home late from work and asks me what I had for dinner. I mutter, "...toast...I had...yeah, toast..."

"Did you eat anything else?"

"...have to get the warranty information for the car..."

"Honey? Shouldn't you eat something else?"

"...trail mix...they have trail mix in the training room up on four...have to remember to get my favorite workout socks from the dryer...prepaid interest from HUD line 802...gotta figure out how to get to HUD 802 from the summary table...left join...water the poppies..."

Later, when he asked me if I wanted to watch more television, or if maybe we should just go to bed, I stared at the coffee table for twenty seconds, then murmured, "...the gargoyle's splitting open..."

"Yeah, honey. That's been happening for a long time."


I looked up at him, and I almost started crying. "It HAS? Ah, man! When did that happen?!?" Because now, you see, I have to add 'Find and purchase replacement gargoyle' to my list. Sadly for A.B. and I, this was the most connected, coherent conversation we had yesterday. And it reminded me of that moment where Brody's yelling at Vaughn and pressuring him to sign the contract to hire Quint, and you think Vaughn's totally out of it, but then he says, "Martin! My kids were in that water, too," and that's the moment you realize that he wasn't out of it at all, that his mind was just racing with all of the things he was juggling, so full and racing that he couldn't even stop from thinking out loud, and it all made sense to him and only him.

I know how ankle socks, trail mix, HUD 802, Mother's Day, the decaying gargoyle statue, my poppy seedlings, Accountant Boy's car, Accountant Boy's nephew's car, the Engineer's birthday, my malfunctioning robot vacuum, peep-toe shoes and a dinner consisting of a plate of toast are related. They're all balls in the air and I'm trying to juggle them, and I'm unable to put any of them down. And in my mind, I'm thinking that if I can just get through this month and June, it'll all slow down. No, that's not right. July's going to be a mess, too.

"...August...we can still save August..."

I'm the mayor of Shark City.

In other news:

--I opened my desk drawer the other day and found a mouse eating my oatmeal. I made my manager clean out the drawer, citing the "Girly Fear of Jumping Rodents" clause in my employee handbook. Then, because it's the kind of thing that's expected of me here at work, I named the mouse Freddy.

--I started the lace sections of Cobweb. Daisy says, "That? My favorite thing you've ever knit." I don't know if I should be delighted or insulted by this. Pictures soon.

--"It's not just a goal for the summer. It's a LIFE goal." What was I talking about? Fantastic museum exhibit? The Boston Pops on the Fourth of July? Machu Picchu? Oh, readers. You ought to know me better than that by now. Click here and find out. It's better if you have the sound up on your computer.

--I broke my yarn buying freeze, but it was for a good reason. Here's the reason.


It's the free pattern that came with a full-bag purchase of Schoeller Stahl 'Arosa'. I've already swatched for it, and I'm a'knittin' it up during the times when I'm too distracted to work on the lace of Cobweb. It's knit on relatively large needles. This makes me happier than you can imagine. Yes, I probably have yarn I could have used for it in my stash, but in order to get the pattern, I had to buy the new yarn, you see. So it was unavoidable. Dammit.

Spring Flower Flash

O.K., so I have knitting content, I finished Starsky, and I have updates on every little thing, but forget about that now. I'm busy with my seething frustration and rage toward every project on my desk.

Here. Stare at the Transvaal daisies.

You Load Sixteen Tons

Look at the pretty!

Why are we staring so intently at the unbelievably vivid carnations today? We are feeling reflective. We are trying to find our calm, our serene center. We are trying to look inward to see ourselves, to see what moves us, what drives us...

...why in the blue blazes of Hell we don't ask other people to do any work for us. Why, when we decided that both yards needed new mulch, we didn't even consider asking for help, paid or otherwise. I don't know why I don't think to do it. Maybe I'm too stubbornly self-reliant. Maybe I'm afraid people will say no, or if they say yes, that they'll disappoint me. We've had that before, where people have offered to help, then didn't show up when it counted. It'd be better if they just said no in the first place. So maybe that's it. Maybe I don't want to put anyone in that position.

"So why don't you hire people to do it?" This one's easy. Accountant Boy says that it's because he's from New Jersey, and that means he doesn't trust anybody. It's nonsensical. Just go with it.

"I'm not letting that guy in my house! What if he's casing it so he can come back later and rob us?"

"Babe, he's the alarm installer."

"Which means he'd know which windows are wired. That makes me doubly suspicious..."

So when the truck from MacAlvey's pulled up with thirteen yards of wet, black bark, we knew what we had to do, and we knew we were on our own in doing it.


"I'll grab the flat-nose shovel."

A.B. worked on the bender board in the front yard, and I started moving the bark. He's better at that detailed work, so I figured I'd do the brute labor for an hour or so, then hand the shovel over to him.

I don't know what happened next, how I got into the groove of it, but I didn't put down the shovel. I worked at it for six and a half hours straight. Fill the wheelbarrow, push the wheelbarrow, dump the bark, kneel down and push the bark around the trees and shrubs, repeat. For six and a half hours.

My neighbor from across the street offered to help, but I declined his offer. "Up to this point, every shovel of bark off of this pile has been scooped by me. I kinda want to see how far I can go."


In order to transport landscape materials without half of it blowing away on the freeway, you have to spray it down. This stuff showed up sopping wet. In addition to making it very, very heavy, the water made it very, very messy. My gloves, the heels of my hands under my gloves, and the legs of my jeans turned black. I had fingerprints on my face from my attempts to brush my hair out of my eyes.


What might not be apparent is that the pile started off at more than four feet tall, ten feet long and eight feet wide. I took down more than half of it by myself. I don't know by weight how much of it I moved. Each wheelbarrow load felt like it weighed about eighty pounds.

Accountant Boy, with the help of our neighbor Mr. Wolf, finished the bender board, finished turning the petanque court into a grape arbor/lounge area, and cleaned and reorganized the side yard. I kept shoveling. "Honey, stop. I can take over now."

"No! Still working! If I stop, I won't be able to start again! Still good to shovel!"

"And that's why you should stop now, while you're still standing. Besides, you're making me look bad in front of the neighbors."

"But I worked so hard on it by myself..."

"How about if we take your picture with the pile so we can remember how much you did?"


"Can I climb it?"

"Of course."


"Did you see how much I did??? I'm like SUPERGIRL!"


We kept working for hours after that, because that's what we do. A.B. brought loads of bark to the back yard and I spread them out around the roses and the lavendar bushes. We finished in the dark.

"This is kind of like the old days, huh?"

"If it were like the old days, we would have brought out the shop lights and worked until two in the morning."


I don't have a good picture of the back yard yet, but here's the front. I did all of this myself -- about twenty-five wheelbarrows worth of it.

I had to use a pumice based foot scrub on my hands and arms to get the black film off of them. As I leaned over in the shower to try to get the hot water to spray right on my lower back, I noticed that my knees were also coal black. It took forever to get all of that stuff off. I still have a couple of streaks on the backs of my arms. My hands were so sore on Sunday that I couldn't pick up a can of pineapple.

I think it was all worth it, though. I'm glad we did it instead of paying someone to do it for us.


This is the other carnation. It's less shockingly fuschia. Look at it grow! It's going to be a good year out in the garden.

What of Starksy, you ask? I'm still, STILL at least a foot away from being done with the belt. Now that the muscles in my forearms don't feel like they're on fire, I should be able to finish it off.