It rained! And I fixed the pipe! And the plants still live!

Graduated from Kaplan teacher training! Really looking forward to teaching. It'll be fun.

Now working on a book to help high school students prepare for the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. government and politics. I follow policy and politics pretty intently, but it'll be fun to see how much of the formal knowledge I remember from high school.

The big news of the last few weeks has been my battle to keep my 100+ baby plants alive despite (a) no rain and (b) no working garden hose. We're somewhere between "moderate drought" and "severe drought." (The Drought Monitor map, as well as the other info at this University of Nebraska—Lincoln site, is pretty cool.) The threads for the hose to screw onto had corroded so badly, no amount of Plumber's Goop would keep it on, plus there were leaks from the spigot and another connection. Duct tape actually worked for one watering per wrapping before it fell off -- duct tape is awesome. I ended up hauling more water than I want to think about one 5-gallon bucket at a time. Have I mentioned I'm not big in the upper-body-strength department?

I read up on taking apart old pipes and flinched every time I encountered the words propane torch. Finally at the crack of dawn one morning, I ventured out with my midsized pipe wrench in hand to see what would happen. The bad section of pipe came right off! Doug dimly remembers, and I think I do too, that we had the same problem shortly after moving into the house and had our handyman at the time fix it. If the pipes had only been together 17 years instead of 71 years, that would explain why they didn't act as though welded together. A quick walk down to the corner hardware store for replacement parts and plumber's tape, and it was all fixed and worked great!

And it finally rained last weekend -- over an inch! Lovely, lovely, lovely steady soaking rain!!!!! I could feel the waves of relief coming from the plants -- I swear I could.

I don't think I lost a single plant to lack of water.

Now the big news is that I think I'm going to have over 30 tomato plants. Yikes. So here's what happened. I got 6 beautiful heirlooms from the Friends School Plant Sale. Then Jung Seeds offered a collection of 16 sweet pepper plants at a great end-of-season price, and they came with 16 tomato plants. (I think I didn't read the fine print very closely. I was just excited about the peppers.) Then, weeks ago, I tossed some old tomato plant seeds in the ground in case one might germinate. Well . . . a whole bunch just came up. Yikes. If they all grow and fruit and the rodents and dogs don't eat them, I'm going to be begging people to accept bags of tomatoes!

Seem to have a soil fungus -- verticillium -- afflicting my dogwood tree, causing all the leaves on one branch after another to wilt. Hopefully, I can prune it back and save it. Hopefully, it won't infect all the barberry that covers the hill starting 15 feet away. If it does that, I will cry!!!

The Emerald Ash Borer has come to Minnesota. Its larvae have started killing ash trees in St. Paul. Our block has lost quite a few elm trees in the last ten years, and the city forestry department chose . . . yup, green ash trees to replace them. I don't find the trees that attractive -- I could take them or leave them -- but I really don't want to lose the time it takes to get mature trees lining the street. The ashes are just starting to be a mature presence and offer a smidgen of shade. The critters are really pretty; it's a shame their larvae are so destructive.

Fun:

• Well, it's not fun that she died, but it is fun that I learned about her: Koko Taylor, "Queen of the Blues." What a voice! What a career in the male-dominated world of blues. How cool that she performed shortly before her death at age 80. Must acquire her recordings.
  
• Sharks in captivity can learn visual and audible signals to know when it's their turn to come to their trainer and eat. Some can even be picked up and cuddled after responding to the cue, knowing that food will be the reward. This article says the "brightest sharks" will be trained in three months. Based on what I've seen of my tropical fish, I doubt it will take that long; when it comes to food, fish can be pretty quick on the uptake.


• The news is that fingerprints don't increase the surface area of our hands and don't increase friction when we grip things, so that's not what they're for. But what I found fascinating is that New World monkeys have "tailprints"; that is, ridged areas of skin on their prehensile tails.


• I'd embed this, but you really have to watch tennis full-screen to follow the ball and get the full enjoyment. Here's a "greatest hits" compilation of French player Fabrice "the Magician" Santoro running his opponents around the court and hitting shots between his legs to win points. Roger Federer breaks into a grin at one point as he's being pulled from net to baseline to net . . . Fun stuff.


• Cute Nike ad celebrating Roger Federer's 14th Grand Slam victory, which tied Pete Sampras's record. He won the 14th at the French Open, held on a clay (crushed brick) surface, which was the one major he'd never won; thus, he also achieved a career Grand Slam at the same time as tying the record.
  

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.

It's a bird! It's . . . a bird? It's really a bird!

New clients: I'm happy to add LID Editorial of Madrid, Spain, and Barron's Educational Series of Hauppauge, New York, to my client roster. I'm looking forward to working on a test-prep title for Barron's next month and titles in English for LID Editorial when the firm moves in that direction.

Now about that bird . . .

Doug and I came home from running errands and smelled something bad. "Did one of the dogs throw up?" Doug asked. "No," I said, seeing the source on the floor, "someone made a big doo-doo."

Both dogs are 100 percent housetrained, so if someone doo-doos, it's because of a crisis of some kind, not a breach of discipline. Therefore, we didn't punish but simply grabbed both dogs and got them outside so they couldn't step in it and start tracking it around the house. As I moved through the kitchen toward the back door with the second dog, I heard -- and felt -- the rapid beating of wings.

"What the . . . ?" I yelled.

"Hey, there's something . . . ! Doug yelled.

A sparrow had somehow gotten into the house and was battering itself against the windows in the kitchen and dining room. Fortunately, as soon as I opened the door to push the dog out, the bird beelined (birdlined?) for it and let itself out. So that was simple. No chasing a terrified bird around and around the house trying to shoo it toward an opening.

The bird must have been so exciting -- or so terrifying (both dogs seemed pretty abashed, though that might have been shame over the bad doo-doo) -- that someone lost control. Too bad the cat was shut upstairs. She would have put a quick end to the fun. Bootsie has been a very effective huntress of mice, and I have no doubt she would have nailed the bird.

We've gotten birds in the house twice before, both times in the basement. (This time, the door to the basement was open, so the sparrow probably started there and then came upstairs.) I think we managed to shoo one out. We found the other just before we had to leave for work and didn't have time to deal with it. When we got home, we found a feather on the floor, and the late Gideon had a smile on his kitty face.

Did I mention that this occurred on the coldest day of the season so far? It was minus something Fahrenheit outside, and we had to open the windows to air the place out.

Speaking of weather, we had a beautifully fluffy snowfall that was light to shovel and makes everything pretty. But we're also having some truly frigid temperatures this week: the high today is forecast to be -6F with windchill readings down to -40F. A windchill warning is in effect for the next few days. This weekend, however, temperatures are supposed to get up to 30F, which will feel like T-shirt weather. Seriously! The body can get used to anything, and I'll certainly be taking out the garbage, etc. without bundling up at all when it climbs above 20F.

Fun:

I want to shout out to a few friends who are doing some pretty cool things:

• Thru A Cat's Eyes is just starting up but is already a lovely place for cat lovers to get affirmation and practical advice. Host Catherine "Cat" Holms blogs the antics and travails of her own cats and has started a photo gallery of cute kitty pics. 2153 <== Those numbers are cat Bootsie's addition to this entry. I'm sure they have great significance.
• Congratulations to my friend, the Reverend Lyle Schlundt, who was ordained last year. He is helping with Wonderful Wednesday services at Unity Christ Church in Golden Valley, Minnesota; officiating at weddings; and seeking a permanent ministry position with a congregation. As a certified shiatsu massage therapist, he also works a couple of days a week at The Aliveness Project in Minneapolis, serving the HIV/AIDS community.
• What a pleasure it was to reconnect with high school classmate Everett Howe. We've been out of touch for over a quarter century (gleep!), but whadda-ya-know? In high school, we shared an interest in J. S. Bach and Monthy Python. Today, we share an interest in public radio, indie bookstores, recycling, and off-the-beaten-track music. In San Diego, California, Everett is a professional mathematician working for a think tank on secret cryptography staff, and his wife works for a public policy dialog consultancy. It's ever so cool when interesting people stay interesting!

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.

I cleaned the dining room!

And this blog continues to be boring -- LOL!

I now have three clean rooms at once: the bathroom, the kitchen, and the dining room. Next up: My office. Will Paula make it to four at a time? Check back later to find out!

I also reorganized my Web site. For one thing, I took the Market List down. I had a long run with it, from 1999 to 2007, but I'm obviously not maintaining it anymore. It was time to take it down. If I begin writing and submitting again, I'll probably do a market list in that same format, which I found easy to use, but I'll probably keep it just for me, leaving me the freedom to include only those markets at which my work might find a home rather than every paying market I hear of. But I left up a bunch of links to other market resources.

I also highlighted my full-time profession as a freelance editor/writer, giving it its own page with a link from the home page. As I've been casting about, seeking another client or two to buffer against the coming hard times, as well as to challenge myself, I realized that my Web site didn't reflect much of a professional presence. It was still set up to promote my fiction, and nothing's been happening on that front for a while. The overall effect was kind of dopey.

Every November, I go through a couple of weeks of finding the cold weather almost unendurable and not knowing how I'll survive when it gets even colder. And then, overnight it seems, I adapt. Today I was taking out trash and replacing outdoor floodlights in a T-shirt and feeling pretty comfortable. Yay!

I cleaned the bathroom!

Hey, this is a boring blog. What can I say? Although if you knew what the bathroom looked like before I cleaned it, you might be more impressed. Fortunately, no photos exist.

I've started cleaning the kitchen. I can hear the news being twittered everywhere.

Mostly I've been sleeping a lot. I think that weeks and weeks of long hours have resulted in a cumulative exhaustion thingie. I'm not depressed! Doesn't feel like that at all. I'm just really tired, in a physical way.

Or maybe I'm hibernating? After a protracted, balmy fall, winter's set in. The other day, it was drizzling ice -- the ice pellets weren't large enough to be truly hail, and it wasn't wet enough to be sleet. Need a new word. Could use a little sun, too. It's been scarce. Five weeks before the days start getting longer again; five months before the first bulbs come up. Minnesota gardens tend to be a crazy hodgepodge of as many flowers as can possibly fit. That's because by the time spring gets here, we're crazy for color.

Well, if I make enough money the next few months, maybe we can spend a week in Santa Fe like we did a few years ago. That was really nice.

Why do cats insist on being in the way? I swear they have a gift for detecting just what you need to look at and placing themselves there.

Fun:

• The Arbor Day Foundation has this cool map that shows how U.S. hardiness zones have changed from 1990 to 2006. Of particular interest to me is the finger of Zone 5 that has crept up the Mississippi River Valley as far as Minneapolis/St. Paul.
• Have I posted this link before? The FreeRice site started as vocabulary SAT prep and is now available to anyone who wants to test and expand their vocabulary and donate rice to the U.N. World Food Program at the same time. For a word geek like me, it's a bit addictive! I see they've added a bunch of other subjects since I last visited -- must check them out!
• Finally, want to put in a plug for my friend Harry LeBlanc's expressive arts therapy practice in Minneapolis: Arts of Passage. Harry has a master's degree in expressive arts therapy and is getting his doctorate. This form of therapy is a great approach for people who want to explore feelings and thoughts that may be blocking their fulfillment but don't want to "talk about their feelings" or have tried traditional talk therapy and found it unsatisfying. Harry's got a bunch of great resources up at his site -- I think it's worth reading his thoughts about the human condition even if you have no interest in seeking therapy at this time.