at home
Thursday, 13 June 2024
I used my new bag of cactus mix soil to up-pot my two night blooming cereus and gave them some special cactus fertiliser. They must have been gobsmacked to be treated so well. I want them to bloom again like they used to! I used a plastic bin to hold the soil, which I thought was rather clever, because those two plants are too rampantly growing to take them into the garage for repotting.
An amazing cactus flower had bloomed in the south window (the one with a great view of the compost bins). AND we had had rain.
It will also get up-potted when it is done with this gorgeous flower.
Margarita was stopping by to bring us something so I picked her a bouquet.
Allan worked some more on rescuing the house from the vine that may be Euonymus ‘Wolong Ghost’, which disconcertingly was trying to insert itself in the very seam where the two halves of a “double wide” manufactured home are joined. What it could have done could give me nightmares. Good thing I decided to make Allan happier by cutting it back and letting some light into the north windows.
He also put some boards behind an old brick planter where I think critters are getting under the house. Sometimes I hear skittering. I wish we had pried the planter away when we first bought the house in 20210, but now an arbor is built into it so…We are kind of stuck with it.
Margarita liked the flowers.
I did some compost sifting resulting in a load of rather coarse compost.
I got this close to the bottom of bin three, but felt too tired to go on.
And then I determinedly forged on and got a second barrow load!
I had decided to tear into a bed (the old danger tree bed) that had lots of fringe cups.
3 P.M.:
That’s where the two barrows of compost went.
6:20 P.M.:
I have propagated a couple of little hydrangea starts from Mary Norwood’s nice array of blue hydrangeas and want to put one in there. I do not plant at the end of the day when I am tired, though, as I would not do a good job.
On the way back, I admired some rose buds against the ‘Red Majestic’ contorted filbert…
….and was pleased to see that I DO have Dianthus ‘Charles Musgrave’, one of my favourites (from some cuttings I made from my one plant of it in a Long Beach planter).
I love the green center.
Friday, 14 June 2024
I sifted compost.
I was almost at the bottom of compost bin three and was amazed that I got two wheelbarrow loads out of it. It has a lot of mown clippings of sword ferns that have turned into nice leaf mold.
The rain came, and I was tired (a common theme but I think it is more mental than physical) so I left one more layer in the bottom of the bin and finished a book that I very much enjoyed. I had started it on June 6th, which shows how little time I take to read during gardening season.
I was hooked when he described getting a kind of vertigo, not the same but similar to mine, and put into words what it is like. “I did not get labyrinthitis because the universe wanted to teach me a lesson about balance. So I tried to live with it as well as I could. Within six weeks, I was mostly better, but I still experience bouts of vertigo, and they are terrifying. I know now with a viscerality I didn’t before that consciousness is temporary and precarious.” Yes, I, too, get bouts of vertigo and it is terrifying.
I have not read his novels, the most famous of which is The Fault in Our Stars, but after reading this memoir/book of essays, I think I will. The book takes all kinds of modern subjects, some serious, some humorous, and rates each one from one to five stars, and every essay is a treasure. It is serious, funny, and deals with many of my favourite subjects, including insight into the author’s struggle with depression.
There was an echo of what I learned in the book I read right before this one, The White Bonus, for example, “And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s.” It is kind of cosmic that two books in a row taught me the same interesting piece of information.
Speaking of information, I like and agree with what he said about the news. (A lot of the book was written during the pandemic.) “Because there is always new news to report, we rarely get the kind of background information that allows us to understand why the news happening. We learn that hospitals have run out of ICU beds to treat gravely ill Covid-19 patients, but we do not learn of the decades-long series of choices that led to a U.S. healthcare system that privileged efficiency over capacity. This flood of information without context can so easily, and so quickly, transform into misinformation. Over one hundred and fifty years ago, the American humorist Josh Billings wrote, “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.”“
The Anthropocene Reviewed also has this same realisation as in The White Bonus and Waking Up White. John Green writes that when he became “commercially successful, my bank called to inform me that I would no longer be charged ATM fees, even if I used an ATM from a different bank. Why? Because people with money in the bank get all kinds of perks just for having money in the bank. Then there are the much bigger power-ups, like the graduating-from-college-with-no-debt power-up, or the being-white power-up, or the being-male power-up. This doesn’t mean that people with good power-ups will succeed, of course, or that those without them won’t. But I don’t buy the argument that these structural power-ups are irrelevant. The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefited from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life.”
I learned a new word: “Many mobile device apps use skeuomorphic design-our calculator apps are calculator-shaped; our digital watches have minute and hour hands, and so on. Perhaps all of this is done in the hopes that we won’t notice just how quickly everything is changing.”
Love this: “It occurs to me that this book is filled with quotes- maybe overfilled with them. I am also overfilled with quotes. For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship.” I love everything about this book and recommend it to you with the utmost enthusiasm.
As we age, I wonder how much our expectations that we should be more tired, become a self fulfilling prophecy. Are we daunted before we even begin to walk up that hill? Is that physical ability age, or a mental state of old agedness that connects too easily to depression and fatigue?
Good point about newscasts lacking background information. We constantly hear about doctor shortages here. A key piece that is never mentioned, is a quiet policy decision a couple decades ago to curtail the number of doctors being graduated because there were concerns too many doctors in a fully public healthcare system would ratchet up healthcare costs. We have never gotten over that chokehold.
LikeLike
Very good questions. Sometimes when I feel very tired and think it is age, I remember moments when I got terribly tired gardening at a job which I had in my early 40s! It could just be that gardening is a tiring pastime. But worthwhile.
LikeLike
That bin never stops giving! I am glad that Allan has stopped the vine from invading the house. The cactus flower is very pretty.
LikeLike
Thanks, Mr T. The cactus flower was a pleasant surprise, I expected it to be plain red.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
An excellent book report. I have it on hold. Thank you Skyler!
LikeLiked by 1 person