Grinch Eve
I'm a winter flowering pansy. So I'm flowering. What's your problem?
Please note snow and ice in the pot. I have no idea. This heroic object has been sitting exactly where you see it through this last month of snow, ice, snow, ice, snow, and ice, on the front stair at the cottage. The reason the pot’s at an angle is because it’s sitting in a miniature snowbank.*
Two of Peter’s presents still haven’t arrived** so I was out sprinting through the town this morning, knocking little old ladies aside and trampling small children underfoot, in search of replacement gifts for The Man Who Is Impossible to Buy Gifts for and Whose Birthday Was Only Eight Days Ago. I was modestly successful.***
But as I was bolting from shop x to shop y I had to pass by ye olde gifte shoppe which ordinarily does not see a great deal of me unless I need another New Arcadia tea towel/mug/postcard to frighten some American friend. And my hand reached for the latch and my feet had taken me over the sill before you could say I’m TIRED of waiting for all our missing Christmas ornaments to reappear.
Oooh! Shiny!
Yup. Bells.
Yes they have teeny clappers and they make a funny ghostly almost-ringing noise.
As you’re wrestling with the little *&^%$£”!!!! which are all possessed by demons (like some tower bells I could name). They’re on a stretchy gold cord and what they love best is going SPROING and then knotting themselves into a yellow-tin-foil rat king.
I had ASSUMED they're plastic but they kinda feel like . . . veneered gingerbread.
LOOK! LOOK! LOOK WHAT I FOUND! METAL HOOKS!
But . . . but . . . they're the wrong shape! They're the right hand hooks--the left hand one is an old one. Boo hoo! Waaaah!
I haven’t decided if I can bring myself to use the new ones. They look so . . . insecure. Of course I do have a pair of needle-nose pliers. . . .
* * *
* I keep worrying about how much garden I’m going to have left by spring. I also wonder if I’m going to have any pots left. I’m resigned to the terra cotta ones all being brick dust by April but plastic—witness my ex-dustpan^—doesn’t like getting this cold either, and what I’m really worrying about are the fancy lightweight fibreglass pots that I loooove madly but that cost. a. bomb. and if all of them have gone I may take up ferrocement^^ sculpture or something instead of more plants.^^^
^ Which I’m still using because I haven’t remembered to buy a new one yet. The dirt tends to fall back out again through the cracks so you have to slide a piece of cardboard under it and then get it to the trash really fast. . . .
^^ Which I assume you can frost-proof, since they make houses out of it.
^^^ Ajlr tweeted this today: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/expect-more-extreme-winters-thanks-to-global-warming-say-scientists-2168418.html
Go away! Frell dranglefabbing off! I don’t want to hear about it! They’ve been wrong before! They can be wrong again. They can be wrong again now. I object to the idea that I’m still living in Maine. In Maine with an hour less winter daylight. . . .Okay. An hour less daylight but better footpaths. At the moment the footpaths are a good deal more negotiable than the [pedestrian] pavements in town, where the unshovelled snow has been beaten into a hard, glossy lonsdaleite-like surface that makes even those of us equipped with yaktrax a little nervous.
** We may have to do something radical this year like celebrate Valentine’s Day. Or maybe I’ll just save them till next year. Assuming that they do eventually arrive. The frelling interwebz are really magnificently unreliable just at the minute. Since I rarely get anything much sent out in time for the actual 25th of December I sign up for those ‘email me when the life size plastic reindeer are back in stock’ alerts and re-order when I can. I’ve had two count ’em two web sites crash fatally on me in the last twenty-four hours—I mean big national mail-order companies, both of which I’ve used several times before—after I’d already struggled through to the end of the check-out process. In one case to the end of the check-out process twice. This is enough to turn Santa Claus into Super Grinch. As I have pointed out in a crisp and brutal fashion to both of them. I actually got a nice email back from the first one saying that they’ve decided to change their money-extracting software because what they’re using is so unstable. YOU DIDN’T WANT TO DO THAT BEFORE CHRISTMAS???
*** Thank the gods for mmmph.^ Also for grzzzf. Which latter I admit is at least half for me, but when you’re dealing with the Impossible Man you snatch frantically at any prospect, even the dubious ones. And I’ll be glad to see it.
^ Remember: Peter reads the blog.
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