Short term plans – school and glasses

Wednesday is my first day of classes.  As you may recall, I’m going back to school to get certified to teach high school business.  I have class just one day a week, for like 5.5 hours.  It should be fun, and interesting, and ok, maybe a little scary to be going back to school after a decade. 

My in-laws are going on vacation for a month soon.  For the last, oh, three years, my mother in-law has bitched and complained that she hates her drinking glasses.  However, because she is frugal and resistant to change and maybe just a little bit crazy, she refuses to get rid of the glasses she hates because “there’s nothing WRONG with them.”  I bought them a set of nice glasses at Macy’s the Christmas before last, and while they have yet to make an appearance, they also weren’t returned, as I discovered the box at the back of their hall closet recently.  I assume this means they like the glasses, but since the ones they hate are still “fine” they simply haven’t put them into commission yet.  Well.  I have a plan.  While they are on vacation I am going to kidnap all the glasses they hate, and populate their drinking glass cabinet with the new glasses from Macy’s.  Maybe I’ll even leave a note from the old glasses, saying they’ve gone on to better things and they will miss their old home.

In other news, my garden is a pretty decent success this year, which for me is saying a LOT.  I had built raised beds in the spring, and almost everything in them is doing fairly well.  I had a little patch of corn that all came down with a fungus called “corn smut” which sounds way more fun than it really is.  All my corn kernels got crazy huge and popcorn-looking, but greyish black.  The intertubes tell me this fungus is a delicacy in Mexico, where they cook it into quesadillas, but like many so-called “delicacies” I will leave it to the natives.  My corn smut got cut down and dumped into our back woods for the groundhogs to feast upon.  Besides the corn failure, however, the garden has been productive.  I’ve made a couple batches of salsa and pasta sauce from my tomatoes, my peppers are actually giving me peppers, my herbs are mostly thriving, and I even have a few watermelon and butternut squash that have set and are getting visibly bigger on a daily basis. 

I have one bed dedicated to scallions, carrots, and radishes, and those are…. OK.  The carrots aren’t getting much bigger than babies, but they are sweet and yummy if not prolific.  The scallions are fine, but the radishes haven’t done much except grow lots of leaves.   A few gave me a decent bulb, but whatever.  I don’t particularly like radishes, I only grow them because they are fun and quick.  Oh, I added a couple rows of broccoli in place of some radishes but that’s just at the seedling stage right now.

And still pregnant.  🙂  I’m in my 20th week, which means I’m halfway through the pregnancy right now.

Advertisement

Not a nurturer

I don’t nurture.

Plants, that is.

I know some people will do all the right things for outdoor plants… mix in compost, adjust the acidity of their soil, fertilize, etc. I guess I take a tough love approach. I buy the plant, put it in the ground, and I figure that if it lives despite my lack of attentiveness, then I have a loyal plant forever. And if it dies, well, I just don’t take it personally.

I thus took the same approach when I planted some daylilies and ornamental grass and some tulip & daffodil bulbs around our new mailbox. The dirt was rocky and dry and I didn’t do a damn thing to it. I could have — my father in-law next door has a pile of topsoil and a pile of compost and he surely would have not minded if I’d helped myself to some. But I didn’t. (Well, I did water it all after I was done, that counts for something, right?)  The daylilies should do OK, and I can’t imagine ornamental grass is all that ornery. And I’ve never had bad luck with daffodil & tulip bulbs.

I think that’s part of the key. I love the idea of rosebushes but I know I would slaughter them. I like to pick stuff to plant that will have a tendency to live, not because of what I do to it, but in spite of what I do or don’t do.