storm day and pop culture

Sunday, 16 February 2014

I woke to disconcerting bright sun much much too early on Sunday and fretted for a couple of hours, in a sleepy daze, about whether or not it was a work day. By the time I could fully open my eyes, a drizzle began. Whew, I really had not been in the work mood.

During breakfast, I perused a new library book:

Gardening in Miniature

Oh, the word MINIATURE always brings back the pain of when I was the last of two contestants in the sixth grade spelling bee, and my opponent, a supercilious young fellow, became the winner when I spelled MINITURE.

But back to the book. It’s full of charming photos, of which these are but a small sampling:

 

 

I felt deeply inspired by the realization that a miniature landscape could be so nicely incorporated into a grouping of medium and large containers. The author has an online shop with all sorts of miniature gardening supplies and plants, and a Facebook page.

The sun showed itself again and I wondered if I had to go to work after all. A walk into my own garden would be a good test of the weather.

hellebore outside our front door

Fatsia ‘Spider’s Web’ in Allan’s garden

Glumicalyx goseloides

I am so pleased that the Glumicalyx (nodding chocolate flower) that I got from Back Alley Gardens has proved to be so very hardy!

Saturday’s wind had brought down lots of small branches.

storm fall

Ah, joy. The sky grew darker and the wind picked up considerably as I rounded the corner into the back yard, so no work today.

Noisy crows gathered in the bogsy wood.

crocuses in the back garden

Watering in the green house, I was happily reminded that I have several small plants just waiting to be planted that would be excellent in a miniature landscape.

littles

Later in the day, we were surprised to not lose power as the wind gusted up to 63 mph just southwest of us at Cape Disappointment. I failed to have a complete reading day as I had to boot up the computer to do the work spreadsheet and a mid-month email billing. I then chose to work on my blog (“before we lose power’), and the usual electronic addiction set in and I had to mess about with iPhoto, “work” on my Facebook pages, pin some images from my blog to Pinterest, recover from a maddening “kernel panic” crash of the computer, etc. After another six hour episode of time-frittering, I finally got back to my pop culture book (Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman)…just until Downtown Abbey.

(Just as Klosterman advised non football fans to not read the chapter about football, I advise that garden blog readers might want to stop here! When work season kicks in, the books reports will peter out.)

I enjoyed the chapter about time travel, skipped another sports chapter about baseball, or was it basketball? except for an interesting thought about the large amount of money made by sports players…and Britney Spears: “A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own person, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money. But she still doesn’t earn a fraction of what she warrants in a free-trade cultural economy. If Britney Spears were paid $1 for every time a self-loathing stranger used her as a surrogate for his own failure, she would outearn Warren Buffet in three months.” While I am sure we all feel that’s debatable, it reminded me of something I had recently read of and had not watched: Celebrities reading insulting tweets from fans. One of the first things I learned on the internet was how scary it can be, when in a seemingly innocuous garden group on Onelist (now Yahoogroups) I came under attack by name for saying (in a thread proposing that all women should use pink tools because women are incompetent at building things) that I wish girls had been allowed to take shop when I attended high school, and that I hoped younger generations of girls had learned the useful skills that were kept away from us. A string of vociferous “Feminazi” and worse insults in a new thread titled with MY OWN NAME persuaded me that it would be better to not use my real name online. On the blessedly rare occasions that I’ve been a target for online wrath, it helps when it’s under a pseudonym.

Back to Eating the Dinosaur. I recommend the chapter called ‘Through a Glass, Blindly’ with its references to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. And oh, how I love this: “Since the end of WWII, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great–a meaningful life is just not possible but required. …A compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable–any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to ‘Eleanor Rigby’… Well…here, here is the whole page.

On page 104, Klosterman refers to Rob (“Love is a Mix Tape”) Sheffield as “supernaturally brilliant”. This ties together the books I’ve read recently, and I like that. It makes life seem more meaningful.