Guess who got a community garden plot this year?
It needs a little love, and I am very excited. Now if only my tomato seedlings cooperate (for once).
Category: garden
A Little Better than Yesterday
This morning the husband was fretting over the slowness of the decline in our state’s COVID-19 numbers. “It’s 2020,” I said. “All I ask for today is that it be a little better than yesterday.”
It has been a good week personally, which feels a little weird, given the larger context. My personal projects are all ticking over with more enthusiasm than usual, probably because I took most of the week off work. I may have to deal with the strong implication that I simply cannot be productive in dribs and drabs of interrupted time here and there throughout my day. If I am doing a NaNo-style 0th draft then sure, I can put out words that way, secure in the knowing that it doesn’t matter if they are barely coherent. If I am revising? Doing research? Five minutes here, fifteen there doesn’t work. Having had the time over the past week, I have figured out yet another structural problem in the fairy book, which I have started working out the fix for. I have also started thinking more seriously about the next project after this one. (Which, believe me, is going to be way more thoroughly planned.)
Other things continue. I had a birthday. Have been trying to get outside, even though the heat has been wretched most of the week. The pea plants are flowering, and the other containers are muddling along all right to my amateur eye (that’s chard down in the corner).
I finished reading Upstream and turned down corners on a quarter of the pages. Dyed my hair again; I like the blue and want to keep it for a while. Went to some online events for career-related topics. Watched TV with my teenager. Pleasant, ordinary life stuff.
How to keep this, or enough of this to get by on, next week, when the world demands more, is the question. Can things get a little better, somehow.
Are We Still Counting Days?
There’s an asterisk in my journal next to the day they started opening things back up in Massachusetts. I don’t feel confident about this process at all, and nothing in our household is going to change for the time being. Caseloads have been shrinking locally, but there are so many variables at work, I doubt that anyone has solid ground to predict farther than a couple of days out. For the time being, I continue to count.
Happy Readercon!
After a bit of dithering (surprise), I decided to go this year. And we got an extra day off at work, so I’m even going to the Friday daytime programming, which is a first. I’m a little nervous about going solo, but it’s all part of the “leave room for things in happen in” practice, and there is a lot of interesting stuff on the schedule.
The summer is passing quickly and without much drama. We did a lot of traveling last week, hence no update–I was tired! with three days in NH at a family Fourth of July, and two in CT visiting friends. I take a picture just like this every summer at the lake, because I am a creature of habit and like to get up early while everything is still.
Fairy Hills just hit 40k words after a few weeks of steady progress. I am making deep changes to this part of the story, so this really is like a first draft all over again. Which is annoying, I confess, because that means that there will be yet another draft in the near future, and I would like to put this project to bed someday. I bought an app called Word Keeper, which is delightful if you enjoy looking at progress charts–sort of like the NaNoWriMo wordcount tracker made perpetual and a bit shinier.
Writing has been going well enough that I have tried off and on of late to turn off the laptop and read in the evening. I’ve read 24 books so far this year, which is frankly amazing (for me). I’ve been reading a lot of new-to-me nonfiction stuff: Thinking in Systems, Liminal Thinking, How to Change the World–you may be sensing a theme. In fiction I have been visiting old favorites. Tea with the Black Dragon is just as charming as I remember it being, as was Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?
In other news, the driveway garden is flourishing. Already considering ways to expand next year, since I haven’t managed to entirely kill anything so far this summer (the basil bolted while we were gone, and a few of the sunflowers aren’t going to make it, but everything else is hanging in there pretty well). I had no idea potato plants grew so big!
And this was a longer update than I expected to write. Have a great weekend!
Strawberry-in-Waiting
R Jean Stevenson 