Growing Thing

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I ran into the house few minutes ago. “Come see! Come see! Better put on shoes, it’s damp out.”

Fabulous hubby, iDJ, didn’t stop for shoes but did grab his iPhone.

“It’s over here, in the corner, you probably won’t get a picture,” says I.

I showed him a gourd I’ve managed to grow. As he was taking a pic, I was blathering away about how I didn’t know if it was a pumpkin or a courgette (zucchini). I lose track of these things, he knows well. I also was telling him how I figured out how to stop gourds from rotting on the vine – it’s called blossom-end rot and if you just manage to keep an eye out for baby fruit after the bloom has faded, you can scrape off the mushy flower with a fingernail and voila! it doesn’t get all icky and decide to die. Hey, I had to Google that one, it was killin me to have a fruit and then, suddenly, a ball of mush.

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It’s still small and unidentifiable – I’m guessing it’s a courgette based on two things – I think that’s what I planted there, and pumpkin usually comes from the vine rather than right at the heart of the plant.

Look at all the other female flower ready to bloom! I might have more, yet – and there is another small one at the back that you can’t see.

Wish me luck!

Let’s talk about dogs

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Right, so – iDJ and I just had a serious conversation about getting the dog ‘fixed’.

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Who, me?

She’s my first female dog, and I did NOT expect a dog’s heat to be so disgusting. She bleeds everywhere for two weeks. It’s horrible. Luckily we have no carpet, so clean up isn’t too hard – if I could be bothered to do it. Last time she was in heat, I found blood spattered all over the lower half of the front door. Two weeks after she was all done. Ew, ew, ewwwww. There’s only so much a Magic Sponge can do, you know? And putting her in his old ratty boxers, with her tail out of the flies, just means we have to change her undies a few times a day and chase her around to put them back on when she slips out of them.

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Oh yes, sooo great for everyone! Now, fair play to Neeks, she does not mind wearing people clothes at all, and never fights this indignity. But she sneaks out of her dog-jocks in her sleep, or when waiting for one of us to come home, or…okay, all the time. But she doesn’t do it on purpose at least.

See…it’s bad to leave her ‘broken,’ aka unfixed. She can get an infection from repeated heats without pregnancy. I don’t want to risk that, and we’ve risked it too long as we’ve been too broke to fix what’s broke.

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Since I got a pay rise at work a few months ago, we’ve recovered a tiny bit and first on my list once we got some ‘wiggle room’ is to get Herself spayed.

And now it seems it’s a plan.

Hope we don’t have to dig the Cone of Shame back out of the attic…

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Harvesting garden goodies and some brotherly lurve

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Good morning! How’s this for a change – me doing a post before noon and I’m totally sober! Usually two of the three things go together: morning and sober. I think attempting to blog before noon might be a first.

Today I’m not even hung over, not a little. I am, however, juiced up on coffee and stuck indoors as the weather is absolute shite. It was bearable outside yesterday so despite a pretty good case of ‘one too many the night before,’ I got a lot of tidying-up done in the garden. Empty pots put away, icky soil and mint that can’t ever, ever, go into my compost bin thrown out, carrots, beets and garlic pulled, monster tomato plants trimmed of dead bits. I’m pleased with the garlic. It’s “oops garlic.” Oops garlic is garlic that you bought in the store and forgot about/didn’t use fast enough, and the next time you look at it, it’s all shrivelled with a massive green spike coming out of it. Oops! I plant it. This year it grew really well for me:

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I might give up on beets next year. Or try another variety. Or actually look up what I’m doing wrong. The beet roots on mine are all too tiny. Easy to grow but… meh. Not worth the effort to peel the little things.

I also think they mixed up my carrot seed with something out of a grimoire:

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These aren’t carrots, they’re Mandrake Root. Oh well, the dog will eat them anyhow. I hope she doesn’t turn into a zombie-dog or werewolf. Hmm, maybe I do – things have been a bit boring around here lately.

So, I promised I’d mention the boys in my next post! Which is now this post. And it is now after noon, by the way. Oops!

I caught the guys in a big cuddle-fest Thursday morning, and for once Lokii’s little black face is clearly visible. So hard to get a shot of him that isn’t anything but big blue eyes in a flat-black wedge.

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Lokii looks happy and interested, Spot looks like he’s got murder on his mind. Let’s try to reverse that, shall we?

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Not so much. Lokii just isn’t capable of looking grumpy. Glad to be able to share his giant schnozz with you this morning afternoon.

Live! Nude! Plant sex organs!

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Pssst. Hey. C’mere. I gots sommat you might like to see! Shhh, not so loud! You wanna bring the heat down on us? These are young ones, spread for your pleasure! Not even a year old!

*_*

Ewww, I just made myself a bit sick with that, sorry. A joke too far, clearly! I think it was the use of ‘spread’ that was too much. But open, or ripe, or fertile would have been just as bad…

In any case, I have more plant pictures. And yes, they are mostly of their sexual organs: usually called flowers by sane people. Plants just have much, much more attractive ‘bits’ than mammals do. I own a mirror, and know how to use Google. Trust me, the plants are way better at ‘pretty.’

And it’s a good thing, as evidenced by the plethora of bees I’ve had this weekend. I was so glad to have them back – I’ve not seen any since spring. They aren’t impressed with the rudbeckia, it being a northern American plant, but they love the lobelia and the devil’s-bit scabious I dug out of the ground by the railway tracks two years ago.

I didn’t take any pics of the bees. That would really be pushing the boundaries of plant porn: inter-class sex. I’d get this post banned, even if I do rate my own blog XXX so the kiddies won’t be offended when I say ‘cuss words.’ (I’ll never be Freshly Pressed because of this, ho-hum.)

So! Who wants to see plant bits? I do, I do!

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Rudbeckia! As I’ve said, I’ve never grown this before. As predicted, hubby loves it! I also didn’t realise it is the ‘black-eyed-Susan’ I’ve heard of all my life. I also didn’t know there’s like a bazillion varieties. Most of mine look like the above, but some look like this:

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I’m happy with them! The blooms last weeks, yay! And they are sure to last after the rest of my babies die off from chill and wind.

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My white and purple calla lilies – they only seem get started just when the afore-mentioned wind and rain sets in.

I’m not too upset about the lack of flowers, the spotted foliage is amazing. Like the skin of a salamander or an alien being.

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Speaking of aliens, this is a macro shot of the finished cosmos flowers I snipped off, to encourage more blooms. I was going to compost this, until the shiny, waxy surface caught my eye and made me look closer. Doesn’t look real, does it? Too perfect, too veiny, and too strange. The seed heads are only about the size of a thumbnail. Neat!

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This is why I have trouble trimming plants. Deadheading feels like beheading when I find such unexpected glories.

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This is the one surviving raspberry plant, grown from seed this year. It’s teeny-tiny, but it was so tiny up until now I couldn’t even take a pic. The other five plants didn’t make it. I learned that berry seeds need high heat for a while before they will germinate. About the same amount of heat they’d get passing through an animal’s digestive tract. Duh! That’s a trial-and error education, by the way.
Please ignore the moss growing on my soil.

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Lastly, my hot mess of flowers. This pic is the only reason I started this post – last weekend! You might recall this planter from a previous post, when I’d nearly forgotten what was in it. My how they’ve grown, despite taking a header off the kitchen windowsill two days after that post! I had to move them to the ugly location here (maybe next year we’ll paint that wall. I wanted to do a mural – maybe a beach scene). There’s a coleus from seed in that shot too – two years old, I overwintered it indoors and it was fine.

Right, this has been the most labour-intensive post ever. I couldn’t get the photos right. Too big or too small, in the wrong place, or adding in a hyperlink I never asked for. I give up! Yes, of course I have more pics…

More snooze alarming

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I don’t know what’s going on with me lately, but I have some serious thoughts in the 10-minute snooze gap. I’m sort of half-awake, half-hallucinating, half-intellectual, half-bad at mathematics.

Today I wondered if digital clocks have any internal parts that rotate. If they do, what direction do they turn? Are they still really digital if the rotation is clockwise? Is it still really a clock if the turn is anticlockwise?

No wonder I never hit snooze more than once a morning.

Pizza angst

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I have to poke fun at iDJ tonight. He makes low-carb pizza once a week, and every time he does, I hear him chastising himself for being OCD about the placement of toppings. I’d like to be able to say it is all in fun, but he really does make a quick meal take ages because he has to have a bit of every topping in every bite. Poor dear. I tried to tell him that you don’t necessarily want every bite to be identical, and I got bitten myself for my ignorance!

So now I get to poke gentle fun at him. No crushed red pepper pain allowed! Here’s his finished product.

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Beautiful, isn’t it? Especially aesthetically pleasing is how every black olive seems to be equidistant from the next. And the pepperoni. And under the cheese, the mushrooms will be as evenly spaced…

Wish he was as attentive to other things! But I guess I should stuff my mouth with this lovely food he worked so hard on, and not bitch about the rest!

(Best pizza in months, by the way! Nom nom nom…)

Snooze alarming

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This morning, in the surreal 10 minutes I allow myself between snooze alarms, I had a Commodore 64 text-only game half-dream wherein your “soul” left your body when you hit the snooze, and if you slept through it, you would turn into a goblin.

The “soul” was a lower-case p, by the way.

I used the above as a FB status update today at 8pm because at 8am it still felt too visual for a short synopsis. I’m not entirely sure if a goblin really was the thing you’d turn into, or if it was a game I was playing in the dream, or if my dream idea of a ‘soul’ just happened to look like a lower-case, slightly green ‘p’ on a black background and my waking brain decided it was an old computer game.

Does anyone remember the text-only game DND? It’s really the only text game I ever played, in 1990, on a Tandy 1000EX. I had graph paper and I mapped out all of the dungeon levels so I wouldn’t get lost. I fudged the truth on FB as no one remembers the Tandy but most would recall the Commodore 64 or 128. We had a 128, hahahah, suck it, you peons who only had the 64-bit version! Our Dad has always been great for keeping up with computers, technology and gaming. We even had an Atari. My older sister liked Frogger best, but I was mad for the Q-man. I played Q-Bert until I got too good at it, and turned the joystick upside down and played it that way as a challenge, until that got boring. And then I realised the whole time I was playing it on the ‘easy’ level. When I switched it to ‘hard’ it kicked my ass and I gave up.

Well I went off on a tangent there, didn’t I. Guess that’s what a blog is for. Mine, anyway.

I have no idea what might happen if you slept all the way through a snooze alarm, I’m just incapable of doing so. Does it give up and stop eventually? Or could it be that the part that makes you you will slip off into the ether, or ethernet, forever?

Stolen Monday evening

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I keep telling the hubby that I’d be more than happy to start and maintain a photo blog for him. This is why:

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This was taken within the last hour, out our upstairs (cat-snot-covered) window. Wow.

Not only am I lucky to have a partner who can take such good pictures, I’m really happy I found one who can see the beauty available right outside our front door.

Random no. 3? 4? I’ve lost track…

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I forgot about this last night. I knew I had something of real importance to talk about!

For some unknown godawful reason, the Irish think that having a bird shit on you is lucky. I learned this at a wedding we attended that was held in an ancient, re-consecrated church with no roof. It did have a lot of annoyed birds who wanted us to leave them alone, and they let us know this in the way birds do best.

I really hope the bride got the crap stains out of her dress, it was rather nice.

Anyhoo, this odd belief came to mind yesterday when I was sitting outside, reading or playing one of my ‘stupid games’, and a bird flew past and shit all over my iPad. It sounded like rocks landing on it from a height and looked like the bird had eaten something unpleasant.

I don’t feel very lucky, despite the fact none got in my hair.

Ooo.

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I have no idea where I’m going with this post so bear with me! Just again feel the need to write, to reach out, and see what happens.

First off I use the WP app to write new posts – rarely for comments – so it was a surprise to realise the update I downloaded over the weekend made a lot of changes. Hence the ‘ooo.’ There’s all kinds of swiping and whatnot instead of the Microsoft-training we all have of closing or ‘x-ing’ out of something. And man, just then: attempting to get the iPad to accept x-ing was a trial… Second time, it’s a winner! I love this stupid thing.

Stupid thing is now a year old! My iPad is a year old. I never wanted it, never even considered it as something I would need. And now? Like a Texan’s firearm, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Yes, I’m teasing my Texas friends here – I seem to have quite a few and none of you fit that stereotype; I know it well but had to poke fun. Feel free to tease me for being a southerner myself, or an Irish drunk with a bad temper! Apparently I am both. Well, part Irish. I do say I’ve taken to the drinking aspect of the culture quite nicely. And I was born in NewJersey – go have a look on a map where the Mason-Dixon line was! Sigh. I can still speak ‘southrin’ any time I want, which entertains Irish people to a great extent. I think hubby only married me because I can do that. I need a south-Jersey refresher course, though – I end up sounding like Tony Soprano when I try. The bad temper is never going away.

What was I talking about? Meh, who cares. I have sunshine again, on a Monday.

And beer.

Woot!

Wait I need a fresh one. At least I’m not abandoning my empties in the grass like I did on Friday. Man, it was so hot that day my sweat smelled of beer. It might tomorrow at work. Whoops. I better switch back to rum and Pepsi Max after this one. It’s just…beer and sunshine are made for each other. I remember the day I discovered Sam Adams Cherry Wheat beer. I’m not usually a big fan of wheat beer but it was a hot day and I had plenty of them in the fridge, and sun and heat and no where to be. I reeked of cherries. It came out of my pores everywhere, liked I’d bathed in cherry skin-cream. Sort of gross, but by then I really, really, didn’t care.

And that wasn’t even the day I broke my pinky toe by sitting in the sun, drinking, and holding my pee so long that when I finally had to get up – about four or five beers later – I smashed my foot into some stairs and aw, first broken bone ever. I was close to 30 if not past it by then. Probably past it. Wonder if beer makes your bones weak? Or if having a massive-capacity bladder does? Ah well. I broke the same toe about 10 years later, just doing my usual tripping over nothing. Sober (ish) that time. Fun times… sad thing is, I used to be able to wiggle my pinkie toes independent of the rest of my toes, as a party trick, and that one doesn’t bend much any more.

Damn you, cloud, go away!

Better go back and reread and see if I have any point here today…

Ooo. Just hit preview and I have no paragraphs. That is bad…this stream of consciousness style of writing depends on visual breaks or I sound like I’m insane. Which is quite likely but I’m usually good at hiding it better. With paragraphs.

Man that cloud is annoying. Just wide enough to block my sunshine and make me cold. Go away, go away faster! Yes I see you moving, but move faster! And you! you, trailing behind! Move upward. Spiders need solar power.

Right, well, it appears I have nothing to say of any real import. I’m trying, I’m reaching out, because I’m in a good mood today and lately I haven’t been anywhere near a good mood. I’m doing my best to keep up a dialogue and even if it is me talking shite via writing, I imagine you listening and I don’t feel so alone.

Now if that second big-ass cloud would just move it along a bit, I’ll be happy…OMG still no paragraph breaks. Time to go find the help on this new app… Sorry… Will edit afterward so I make a modicum of sense.