Friends School Plant Sale!

Picture this: The huge maple tree in back is blooming, showering the yard with a steady dusting of yellow flowers. Cubby Bear goes outside and comes back in covered in flowers clinging to his fluffy coat. A total springtime doggie! I didn't have a camera in hand, so don't have an actual picture to post, but here's an old photo of Cubby in the backyard. You can fill in the flowers.


Next I want to whine about weather. I know . . . I live in MN and really shouldn't gripe, because once one starts, there's no end to it. But . . . this really sucked. We've had a dry spring, and the plants need rain. My new plants (see below) with their little bitty root systems really need rain. Massive storm system sweeps across the entire Upper Midwest. I watch it on radar. It gets closer, it gets closer -- and the little piece of the front that passes over our house fizzles out just as it reaches us, then reforms. We got 0.01 inch of rain. Bleh. So whine, whine, whine.

And the pipe that the garden hose hooks up to has finally lost all its threads to corrosion. I couldn't find my Amazing Goop, which I used on it last year, but I did find some outdoor adhesive compound. I used that, let it cure, and it worked long enough for me to give everything in back a good soaking. Now I've found the Amazing Goop, but it was too cold for it to cure today. The plants in front couldn't wait any longer, so I ended up hauling water to them by the five-gallon bucketload -- close to 20 buckets? It was worth it, though, so that (a) the plants would survive and (b) I would stop worrying about them.

Plants! OMG!!! Last year, I missed the Friends School Plant Sale because I'd been up working all night and been putting in 18- to 20-hour days before that and didn't grok how long the lines would be and just couldn't deal with it. This year, I was up all night working but was determined to do the sale . . . and I did . . . and I went crazy!!!!! Holy cats. I probably got 150 plants. Lots of natives -- their selection seems to get better every year -- and nonnative perennials/shrubs I've wanted forever to fill in my front yard and boulevard. The tear-out-the-lawn-and-replace-it-with-more-interesting-stuff-that-doesn't-need-to-be-mowed project may finally be nearing completion. It was never intended to take however many years it's taken! Much of the last week has been devoted to figuring out where everything should go and putting it in the ground. I'm nearly done. If everything survives, it's going to look so cool! As a side note, I had good survival over the winter, so that's got me feeling all optimistic and sunshiny. I also got some tomatoes, peppers (Cubby Bear better not eat them this year!), and peanuts (apparently you can grow them here) for the veggie patch and a couple dozen annuals for here and there.

The Friends School Plant Sale is worth a shout-out for its amazingness. It was organized 20 years ago to raise money for a local K-8 private school run by the local Quakers. The first year, it occupied a few tables on the school grounds, and two volunteers helped 100 customers. Today, it overflows the grandstand at the State Fairgrounds. Over 800 volunteers help up to 15,000 customers shop over 2,300 plant varieties. Over $200,000 is raised for scholarships. It's a good thing that gardeners are polite, patient people (you kind of have to be patient to deal with plants, which do everything on their own inscrutable schedule), because we were wall-to-wall with no room to take more than one free-swinging step before needing to stop or shuffle. While some customers are men, the vast majority are women, and the estrogen energy was palpable. While waiting in line to get wristbands, a bunch of us bonded and shared life stories. I have to give special acknowledgment to the Friends School kids who volunteered at the sale. They were amazing: hard working, polite, articulate, and possessed of initiative and intelligence and can-do spirit. Also, if you're at all interested in gardening, the sale catalog (PDF) is totally worth downloading and perusing -- it's an education in itself, and one can always plug a plant's name into Google to find out more about a particularly intriguing species.

Whew! Got that out of my system. It's pretty dang exciting, that plant sale. Doug just shakes his head in bafflement at all this. He looked at my five flats of plants and said, "Hmm, green things," and then later, "That cost $xxx?!" But he's very patient and supportive of my mania. Only other thing that happened gardeningwise is that the adorable bunnies whom I fed birdseed all winter ravaged my new tulips as they came up. I think most have enough leaves to gather strength and come back next year, but I sure got a lot less flowers than I was expecting. Feckin' bunnies.

Life is not all plants and more plants. Kaplan Test Prep training is going well. I have my last teachback session tomorrow evening, and then we graduate on Tuesday. Exciting! Of course, I knew the test content and the Kaplan methods from the work I've done on Kaplan's books the last few years. However, now I've been learning to teach it so that a class of students of various abilities and with diverse goals can maximize their scores. The amount of resources students get is terrific, and the Kaplan methods for each question type really do work great -- they even make the test easier for someone like me who already does well on it. I've really enjoyed the camaraderie with my fellow trainees and hope we'll continue to see each other after graduation. Our trainer is awesome -- she's getting her PhD in immunology and is a master teacher who knows all the tests. She has fabulous energy. I hope to emulate her at least a little bit.

Also, I attended an event put on by the Minnesota Book Publishers' Roundtable for the first time. Two editors discussed developmental editing. It was good to learn more about the publishing industry outside of the narrow slice I see from my freelancer's viewpoint, and I enjoyed chatting with the folks at my table. Lunch was tasty, too! And it was held at the Open Book, a cool renovated old building dedicated to books, publishing, writers, and book arts (making handcrafted books). I'll probably go to more of their events.

Life is not all about work, either. I've actually had time to read in the last month. Finished Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan, a fictional imagining of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright's common-law second wife. Horan does a great job of bringing the characters and the period to life. If things didn't actually happen the way they do in the book, they should have. It has that kind of "truth" to it. The part of the story set at Taliesin (south-central Wisconsin) was extra interesting because we toured there last summer; I could visualize everything that happened.

And I've started The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, a deeply historically grounded retelling of the Arthurian legend. I'm only on about page 50, but so far, it's freaking awesome!!! I'd already read his Sharpe's novels (Napoleonic era) and his American Civil War novels, which were all good. But here he takes his craft, as a writer and as an historian, to a whole different level. We've got the pagan and Christian religions, a bunch of competing political interests, and ethnic strife, plus a cast of fascinating characters who are alien due to their separation from us by time yet very human. The level of detail with which the material and social culture is rendered is worth the read in and of itself, even if there weren't a plot.

Fun: The fun this time is all courtesy of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!. How would I stay up-to-date on important news without that program?

• "Weisure" time: "The line dividing work and leisure time is blurring right before our eyes, says one expert, and it's creating a phenomenon called 'weisure time.'" I completely agree with what sociologist Dalton Conley says, but does he have to call it weisure time? That's horrific! Of course, I thought blog was a horrible word, too, but it's here to stay and I've even gotten used to it. But weisure? Ughhh!!!
• Louisiana Walmart employees adopted a stray nutria (and named it Norman). A shopper is suing for damages.
• Be really, really, really careful if you decide to clean out the fridge at work lest a hazmat team descend on the scene, as it did at an AT&T office in San Jose, California. A number of people were hospitalized due to the combination of cleaning solutions and god-only-knows stuff-that-once-was-food.

She's Trouble with a Capital "C"!!!

Cat Bootsie, that is. I'm getting ready to stuff her in a box and ship her off somewhere. Kidding, of course. I adore her. But she's a total pain in the ass. I've been working mostly on hard copy for the last couple of weeks, including two massive test-prep books for the GMAT (business school exam), and she seems to view manuscripts as her natural prey. She's relentless too. No matter how many times I pick her up and put her on the floor, where she has a fleecy thing to lie on and a heating vent she likes, she jumps right back up and insists on being front and center. She attacks the manuscripts, my pen, and my arms. Then when she senses my frustration, she starts purring and rolls over to show me her tummy. I have to shut her out of my office, but then she claws at the door. So I have to shut her out of that section of the house, putting two doors between us, to have peace. And then I feel guilty for being so mean to the adorable kitty.

I was searching on Petfinder.com to find her a little kitty friend to play with, but I think she needs to remain an only kitty. We just can't risk the litter box politics that plagued us with our previous two cats. Also, Bootsie's so intense, I'm afraid a lot of other cats would be intimidated by her. Plus, if they ganged up on me, I'd be totally out-kittied!

I haven't blogged for a while because life has been mostly quiet. I've been working up a storm, despite having a cold that lingered for weeks. Bleh. (Like the last cold, which I got after Christmas, this one was a result of close proximity to little bundles of germs joy.)

I also had a scare when I went for a routine eye exam to get my prescription updated (close-up, detail vision is pretty blurry) and couldn't focus my right eye. Then the doctor found some odd pigmentation on my right macula. I followed up by going to a retina specialist who diagnosed me with pigment dystrophy, which means I have funny macular pigment. He said some doctors would diagnose me as having macular degeneration and prescribe vitamins, but I was too young to be worried about that yet. From all this, I gather I have the very beginnings of macular degeneration but won't need to worry about my functional eyesight for a long time. By then, I hope they'll have a cure more definitive than "large amounts of antioxidents might have a preventive effect in some people."

Bunny (or maybe more than one bunny) continues to visit nightly for the smattering of birdseed I toss under the feeder. A few weeks ago, the snow cover had retreated quite a bit due to sublimation (it was bitter cold, but the snow evaporated because the air was just so dry), and I saw another bunny a few blocks from home who had come out to try to find something to eat. That bunny was skinny and scruffy. The bunny(ies) in my yard is fat and sleek. When Bunny strips the leaves from my Asiatic lilies in the spring, I know I will not find Bunny so cute.

I'm getting impatient with all the talking heads in the media claiming that the Obama presidency is hosed. The guy's been in office two months. He's got four years. No, he hasn't turned around the recession yet; no matter what anyone does, the economy will start perking up next year. No, he hasn't brought bipartisanship to Washington yet; you don't change a deeply entrenched culture by flipping a switch. It's taking longer than anyone would like to fill positions; it always does. (Though I don't understand (a) why these people don't pay their freakin' taxes and (b) why it's vetting for a government position, not an IRS audit, that catches them.) Yes, he's talking about health care and global warming and Afghanistan in addition to the economy; yes, he can multitask, even if the media has trouble doing so. Everybody: Lighten up!

Fun:

• Histiophryne psychedelica is a recently discovered tropical fish that uses legs to "hop" around coral reefs, a behavior never previously seen in any other fish with legs. Check out the University of Washington article here, which includes video. Photo below ©David Hall/seaphotos.com.
  
  
  
  
• In a study in contrasts, here's another recently discovered fish, this one from a depth of 2.8 miles near Anarctica.
• According to a supercomputer named ThamesBlue, the oldest words in the English language may be I and who. The word dirty may die out fairly soon.
  

Ghost in the Machine, Pain in My Arm, and Bunnies in the Yard

So one day, the TV starts displaying closed captioning. There's a button on the universal remote with both words and symbols indicating that it's for closed captioning, so we try pushing it. Nothing happens. We try lots and lots and lots of things. Nothing. So how did it get turned on in the first place? Presumbly one of the dogs had something to do with it, but damned if we can figure out what they did. Both cable TV and DVDs give us printed words as well as sound, and neither of us is hard of hearing. During Australian Open tennis, the printing covered up the score line. This is apparently not a unique problem: when I searched for an answer, I found this person.

For me, the situation has an additional wrinkle, in that I tend to mentally copyedit everything I read and the captions have an awful lot of typos. Aargh!

I've been working out for a couple of months now, gradually building up the intensity. I've tried this many times over the past few years. Usually an injury or illness stops me, and then I don't get going again. But this time it's going pretty well. I started on the exercise bike in front of the TV. Then when I could do five days in a row at a decent intensity without feeling much soreness, I moved up to step aerobics. I've been gradually increasing the length and intensity of those workouts, and just last week I added my homebaked version of BodyPump (a weightlifting routine set to music, with ~5-minute sets for each muscle group). I think I had a mild hamstring pull in December, and then I got the stupid ankle-nerve thingie last week (see last post), but I've kept it up. It feels really good.

Then yesterday, I guess I overdid it on the tricep extensions, because I woke up to agonizing pain in those muscles. I couldly hardly push myself to a seated position to get out of bed. (The Rottweiler snuggled up against me like glue didn't help.) It took a few hours, but I finally sorted out the pain enough to figure out that, instead of being muscle soreness (of which I have none, I'm happy to say), it was injury. The left arm has pretty much cleared up, but the right tricep doesn't want to extend. It contracts just fine, which makes me think the problem is a tendon/ligament thingie rather than a muscle thingie. Yes, I'm right-handed. Dressing myself and feeding myself present real challenges. Fortunately, there's no problem working at the keyboard. Unfortunately, I was going to do housework today and really can't. So I'm writing this.

I won't be doing upper body weights again for a while, but I should be able to do step as long as I'm careful to keep my arms straight-ish as I move them.

Rabbits have always been attracted to the spilled seed under the birdfeeder (birds are messy). After we put up the privacy fence around the backyard about five years ago, we got a lot fewer rabbits in the backyard. One night this winter, though, we spotted a bunny under the feeder. I started filling the feeder at dusk every day and intentionally spilling a tablespoon or two of seed on the ground. Bunny came back, started coming back more often, and now comes every night. In fact, there may be more than one bunny -- I think I'm seeing at least two, one larger than the other, but only one shows up at a time so it's hard to tell. I've never had a steady "relationship" with a bunny before, so this is fun. I'm looking forward to baby bunnies in the spring.

Fun:

• I haven't yet acquired this book, but I must: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. This novel "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. . . . [It is] a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead."
• This new study published in the journal Science may explain why copy editors and proofreaders (and many English teachers) use red pens (or the electronic equivalent). Apparently, the color red may help people focus on detail, while the color blue may help us be more creative. Although I can't help wonder, given the tasks the study used, if the connection has more to do with red = verbal and blue = spatial. Anyway, interesting stuff. I had my office walls painted peach (a mild red tone) and the ceiling an intense blue-green, so I think I've got some inspiration for whatever kind of thinking I want to do, depending on where I look. :-)
• If the zombies invading Regency England don't give you nightmares, this might: Titanoboa cerrejonensis was probably about 45 feet long, snacked on crocodiles, and was the biggest land animal on earth for about 10 million years. It was named for its size (genus) and the Cerrejón coal mine (species) in northern Colombia where at least 28 skeletons were found.

3.5 Rooms Clean, Bunny, and Near Tragedy

We had a near-tragedy in our family. Jennie Cocco, a long-time family friend, was leaving Doug's parents' house when her vehicle's accelerator stuck. The house fronts on a canal, and her car went into the water. Fortunately, two men, one on either side of the canal, witnessed the accident, jumped into the near-freezing water, and helped pull her out of the car and to safety. She was treated for hypothermia and released later the same day. Needless to say, we're all quite shaken at the near miss. The accident happened very quickly on a road she's driven for 25 years. Here are the news stories here (no family members appear in them -- nobody in the family is a Joe the Plumber type, looking for 15 minutes of fame):

• Newsday


• WABC (New York Channel 7)


• WCBS (New York Channel 2)

To continue the saga of my housecleaning efforts (yes, this feels trivial after the above, but life is made of tragedy, trivia, and hope -- no?), I made slow progress on my office, getting out most of the stuff that didn't belong in that room and sifting out the papers that needed shredding from the rest of the office paper recycling. Then I got a big copyediting project, and now the three rooms that were clean are dirty again (though not as dirty as before). So I'm giving myself credit for three and a half rooms. I may have a couple days of light to no work today and tomorrow, so my hope is to reclean the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room and perhaps finish the office. Maybe I'll get four rooms clean at once after all?

Last week, Doug pointed out a bunny who was visiting under the bird feeder, eating spilled seed. Our backyard used to be a regular thoroughfare for rabbits, but since we put up the privacy fence, they don't come in as often. They probably don't like coming into an enclosed area where they can't see around them for some distance. Anyway, I've been making a point of spilling some seed on the ground every evening, and bunny keeps coming back. The dogs go out a couple of times a night and give chase, but bunny doesn't seem to view this as a deterrent.


Yesterday morning, the elder of my two Colombian ramshorn snails decided to take a nap -- on his side in the middle of the tank. I thought he was dead, but he was still curled up tightly in the shell, and I've read that when they die, the curling-up-tightly muscle relaxes. And no one was eating him, including the loaches, whose natural food is snails. So I left him there. Sure enough, he's crawling around now like a healthy snail. ???

I should go out and shovel. It looks like we got 6 inches of snow last night, but it's –5°F. Perhaps the snow fairy will come and take it away. Or maybe I should get out there and shovel. Brrr.