Rants, various
Remember it was supposed to freeze again last night? It didn’t. It rained instead. Cold, nasty rain, but still rain. So today I have a (rather wilted) Large Cardboard Box in my kitchen (with all the plantlife), drying out in front of the Aga. The grow light delivery boxes aren’t nearly big enough for maximum [frost] impact geranium duty. (The grow light boxes were also out in the rain. Sigh.) Perhaps a judicious application of tape after the drying-out process is complete. Said Large Cardboard Box may, however, be performing a service* by blocking some of the heat that is making my rose bushes think it’s spring.
B_twin_1 last night helpfully posted words of wisdom from Peter Beales** to do with the storage of bare-root roses during inclement weather: that what you absolutely don’t want to do is keep them in the house because the warmth will make them sprout. Yes. I know. And if I didn’t know it already, I knew it as of about three days ago, when my rose bucket in the corner by the kitchen door*** started boiling over with leaves. I probably have the same Peter Beales book on my own shelves . . . and if I didn’t want to read it in his pages I have probably two dozen other rose books that would be more than happy to tell me the same thing. But have you ever noticed the way life is (a) short and (b) a compromise? I haven’t got a suitable frost-free outbuilding to keep my inconvenient brown paper parcel of bare-root roses in: neither my tiny garage nor my tinier summerhouse/shed at Third House is insulated, and I’ve killed things by leaving them in the honest-to-goodness tiniest glass greenhouse at the cottage in less severe weather than we’ve been having lately. Next winter† the summerhouse will be equipped for osteospermums, geraniums, begonias, chocolate cosmos, dahlias, etc. This year . . . I’ve compromised with the weather gods to have live bare-root roses. Even if that means a hedge in February.
Which reminds me, I need a few more tarpaulins to finish the job in the sitting-room, although it already looks like an outtake from some dystopic SF film about long distance space travel.
And it’s not supposed to freeze tonight. So I’ve left the trees outdoors.†† Unless I change my mind at 2 am.
***
* This is Glad Gaming with a vengeance when talking about anything that is occupying further floor space
** The man with the interesting 20% off sale price of all rose bushes till the end of the month.^
^ Which if my frelling bank ever gets around to sending me my new credit card I could possibly take advantage of.+ I’ve now been credit-card-free for nine days and I am not happy. I keep thinking, don’t these people realise they’re losing revenue? Your average monster globe-bestriding etc corporation is so hot on fiscal acquisition that they do things like try to fire people who want to take maternity leave for being insufficiently committed to criminal gain. And here they can’t even get a new credit card into the feverish hands of someone who is burning up++ with the desire to buy roses.
Tonight I thought, fine, I’ll finally apply for a second credit card, I always mean to precisely for occasions like this. The one I’ve got contributes .0000000001 p per transaction to the National Trust+++ so I thought I’d broaden my horizons a little and go for Amnesty International this time. After ten minutes of a robo phone voice saying ‘you are moving forward in the queue’ every twenty seconds# I decided to try on line as the robo voice also suggested.
The address for the ‘apply for credit card’ page is broken. And the Amnesty site search won’t bring it up at all.
And nobody has explained to me just how my original credit card was ‘compromised’ in the first place. It’s not like I hang out in rough neighbourhoods or answer any of those emails who want my bank details so they can put several million dollars/pounds/euros/kumquats in my account because they can’t get it out of their war-barricaded country any other way than by the practical sympathy of morons like me.
Okay, small stuff, but isn’t there an awful lot of small stuff? Doesn’t there seem to be an accumulation of small stuff?
And you read about Bernard Madoff who has made $50 billion disappear up the magic bunny’s rear end by making investing with him look like some kind of really exciting private club; or this grimly fascinating article, which is a kind of intro to economics 101 for those of us who don’t ordinarily read the financial pages: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/09/economic_disasters_and_stupid.php
And then maths idiots like me## look at government ministers and Oxbridge and Yalevard economists and so on throwing up their tiny hands in wonder at why the stock market dropped sixty-two trillion points today. It’s nothing to do with money per se: the tipping point of incompetence has been reached.
. . . End of rant. I just want to buy some roses.
+ Speaking, perhaps, of annoying things performing unexpected services
++ Okay, it might just be menopause
+++ http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/ for anyone who isn’t already sociopathically fascinated by old-fashioned and legendary Britain and therefore knows all about it, and probably belongs even if they live in Maine. Ahem. (Sorry it’s not hot-linking itself. I have no idea why.) I had to join for Mottisfont of course–national collection of old roses: I blogged about it last summer–but I am sociopathically fascinated by old-fashioned and legendary Britain too.
# Superior phone queue robo voices tell you where you are in the queue: so this new bank is already losing ground with me
## And did anyone else read about, say, Enron with a strong sense that you’re obviously just not getting it because this is insane?
*** Where it’s actually fairly chilly
† Yes, you read it here, so I guess I’d better do it. Maybe somebody could remind me . . . oh, next August or so.
†† Tassiegal posted this in response to my entry about the arrival of fruit trees in the middle of the worst cold spell in twenty years:
| Delivery Man: Hiya I got trees Robin: Trees? TREES? TREESSS?????? DM: Yup trees Trees: – HURRY UP IT’S COLD! Robin: TREES??? Trees: Look you might have forgotten you ordered us but we are here now and WE ARE COLD! DM: So where do I put them? Robin: TREEES? Trees: Yes we have established this now GET US INSIDE BEFORE WE DIE! Robin: Kitchen – yes kitchen that works for now. Trees: Warm? DM: Sure….(walks past lounge into kitchen and thinks to self…is that a GREENHOUSE?)^ Trees: We want IN THERE! Robin: Thanks DM: Not a problem Robin: Now what ARE you? Trees: TREES DUH! FRUIT TREES to be precise…now please be taking us to that lovely WARM looking place with the other pots. Robin: where do I PUT you? Trees: IN THERE YOU DOLT! Robin: Oh well I guess you have to go with everything else and I’ll find somewhere ELSE to move the sofa.^^
|
^ No, no! The SITTING ROOM is the greenhouse! The kitchen is a room with a few plants in it! Maybe a rose hedge!+
+ Which I am carefully keeping away from the grow light. There are limits. And I still need to be able to get it out the door again a little later in the year.
^^ No, no, I’ve got the sofa problem licked. You put a tarp over the sofa and then a plank on the sofa seat and . . . I told you! New sofa shaped plant stand!
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.