Tea and No Sympathy
IT’S RAINING. Of course it’s raining. It has always rained. It will always rain.* Tomorrow we’re supposed to have gales. I’m so happy. Meanwhile the robins have dispersed. Silly little beggars. They should stay in the greenhouse where there’s a roof. I’ve thought of this a lot in the last ten days or so—at least the baby robins in the greenhouse aren’t melting. There is a good EIGHT INCHES of rain in my buckets. I’ve emptied my two-inch-measure rain gauge several times. Robins were still in the nest yesterday but gone without a trace today. Usually the little-things-in-the-shrubbery start making themselves known immediately—and there’s no way in or out of the cottage garden except by flying** unless I open the greenhouse door, which I haven’t in over a week.*** They’re probably in shock: they hop out of the nest, stumble along the shelf, nose-dive to the ground, yell, YAAY! FREEDOM!, and are instantly smacked to the floor by a large handful of rain.
The double daily serving of mealworms disappeared as normal today however, so something is eating them. The mealworm saucer—also inside the greenhouse, where dinner won’t drown—is on the flight path to the nest and I haven’t seen anything else hanging around, so I prefer to think it’s dad robin. I’ve seen him a few times, looking harassed. If perhaps there’s a break in the gales tomorrow I would quite like to get outdoors and pot up a few little green things (this will involve moving the dish of mealworms, which is on my potting table) and will try to catch dad poking mealworms into little things in the shrubbery.
I rang for a wedding today, in South Desuetude, poor things. I hope the bride’s gown had mud flaps.† But Colin is bonkers.†† We rang some rather good call changes, nice and brisk and crisp. I’ve said this before, that you’re usually so fixated on trying to learn methods that you forget that (mostly) well-struck call changes are pretty cool. Then Colin cast his eye over his band and declared that we would ring bob triples. For pity’s sake. Four of us out of eight knew what we were doing—I can’t remember the last time I was offered the opportunity to have a go at a practise course of bob triples. And we’re ringing it for a wedding??††† Two of us clueless ones were on the treble and the tenor—but I was ringing inside as was Cora, who promptly went wrong on her first dodge. Colin dragged us jovially out of the resulting morass and we continued . . . and then Boadicea went wrong. No fair. You’re one of the ones who knows what she’s doing. I never did figure out who I was making long sevenths over. I know the line on the page, as opposed to in the hurly-burly of ringing, so I just kept counting my line—and Colin kept yanking us on. We came round. I have no idea how. It cleared the churchyard however. . . .
And I went home for a bracing cup of tea.
libby.gorman
I do not know about this “warming the cup” part of making tea. Doesn’t the hot water make the cup warm?
b_twin_1
Depends how long you want the cup of tea to stay hot. If you want the tea to cool quickly so you can gulp it down before you dash out the door then a cold cup will assist. If you want a leisurely cuppa then warming the cup is “proper”.
::Clutches forehead:: Where were you people RAISED? Is NOTHING SACRED? Have the younger generations been DENIED THE WISDOM OF THE AGES? You warm your vessel for brewing tea—cup or pot—so the tea steeps correctly. ‡ And then there’s the whole commotion about whether you add the milk first or second: but since I don’t use milk I am allowed to give a miss to this embattled controversy.‡‡
Now I am going to SING. Oisin gave me a, you should forgive the term, new thing yesterday, which casts an interesting light on his view of my singing, but I’ll tell you all about it if I manage to learn it. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
* * *
* Except when there’s a drought, of course.
** All right. I admit it. Phineas’ previous cat once made it over his garden-room roof into my garden. I was not amused. He^ received a bucket of water for his pains and I didn’t see him again. Grrrrrr.^^
^ The cat, that is. Not Phineas.
^^Q&A page today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/27/joss-whedon-screenwriter-director
Cat or dog?
Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here’s a mouse.
Feh.
Cat: misses litterbox, plays head games, leaves dismembered corpses on your pillow. Dog: craps outdoors, doesn’t mind admitting is glad to see you, finds sleeping in heaps with chosen goddess sufficient glory and does not keep presenting asshole for admiration when you’re trying to watch a film.
. . . AT WHICH POINT The Cat Anti-Defamation League, or possibly the Joss Whedon for Galactic Supremo Party, nailed me and WORD CRASHED . . . taking, among other things, New Thing with it. Granted I have New Thing backed up liberally but I hadn’t copied today’s ep yet. GAAAAAAAH. Microsoft Recovery seems, in fact, to have recovered . . . this post, anyway, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll start a new file with today’s ep of New Thing, just in case of retrospective accidents. And the four hundred and six empty documents also recovered are making me nervous. What I had been trying to do was copy and paste one other quote from this article which maybe I’ll just type in . . .
How do you relax?
I do not understand your earthworld questionings.
Maybe Whedon should take up bell ringing.
*** I have MILLIONS of little green (mostly) mail-order things waiting to be potted on and/or planted out. MILLIONS. I swear every day Cathy was here there was another frelling delivery of little green things wanting to be potted on. I’M SURE I DIDN’T ORDER ALL OF THIS STUFF. And the day of our expedition, the one that was foiled, we stopped at a garden centre on the way home^ so that I could assuage my lacerated feelings and . . . MILLIONS. I’M TELLING YOU. MILLIONS.
^ I was driving. Cathy couldn’t stop me. She tried.
† Although my sympathy dwindled to negligible when she was half an hour late. I am near as near to finishing my second leg-warmer however. I wonder what horrors I will produce/reveal when I try to seam the frellers up.
†† We knew this, of course. Meanwhile Niall is disloyally going back to Curlyewe on Monday—which is their tower practise night, so it’s easier to organise them to come along early for a slug of handbells first. He promises this will not become a regular event. I’ve never rung at Curlyewe (tower) so I’m jealous . . . and then it turns out Colin’s tower practise this Monday is on his grisly little garage ring—with the flowerpots in the ceiling, and the tenor, the biggest bell, weighs eleven frelling pounds. It’s like trying to cook with a doll’s tea set. ARRRRRGH.
††† Maybe if she hadn’t been half an hour late. . . .
‡ You need half-decent tea for the effect to be noticeable however. Do not speak to me of tea BAGS if you wish to live. And the latest fashion nonsense about triangular-solid-shaped bags that bloom in hot water, frelling spare me. As if anyone who drinks PG Tips cares. Mind you, if all you want/need is a slug of caffeine as rapidly as possible, it’s all good. But a really excellent cup of tea worth lingering over requires finesse. Which includes superior-quality LOOSE tea . . . and warming whatever you’re making it in first.
‡‡ When I did use milk, I added it second. But this was not because of philosophical deliberations or considerations of the physics of creaminess. It was because I wanted to be sure the sixty-four spoons of sugar I put in first dissolved properly.
New Thing, New Thing, nanny-nanny-boo-boo, tra la la New Thing
::dandles New Thing::
::dandle-dangle-dandle-twinkle-dingle-dangle::
::hums idly::
And, finally, bursts into loud roars of evil laughter. MWA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA . . . . Sorry guys. Ordinarily I loathe and despise people who tease* other people but . . . but . . . well I’m having a good time with the New Thing. I think you will too** . . . or if you don’t I will crawl away into a corner and cry . . . but the thing thing is that the blog is such a lot of work. I’m increasingly aware that I can’t do this forever, even if there were enough people who wanted me to, but that while the obvious answer is to change the wretched thing somehow, I am hideously constrained by what I can do . . . which includes the limitations of the peculiar personality that does it. Just declaring ‘less often, fewer words and more other people’s books’ does not work.
I think . . . I think . . . I’ve found something that will work.
It’ll make better sense after I post the beggar. And then I’ll tell you more about it too. Meanwhile . . .
::dingle-dangle-glitter-flourish-swank::
Tomorrow? I might post it tomorrow. I might. Or maybe I’ll post it Wednesday. Or Thursday . . . or . . . decisions, decisions . . .
::twinkle::
Catlady
I have so far avoided getting a cell phone because the very idea that someone could call me at any time is so terrifying that I’d rather get stuck halfway home and have to walk my broken bicycle straight to the dentist than have the ability to call someone to come rescue me.
Um. Not that I wish to damage the perfect bloom of your paranoia—having a number of healthy, well-nurtured paranoias of my own—but you do know you can turn it off, don’t you? There are, so far as I’m aware, two options for the turning-off thing: you can either merely make it not make noise by setting it to ‘vibrate’ which means it will undulate embarrassingly against your leg—GADFRELLINGZOOKS I HAVE A RAT IN MY POCKET—oh, wait, it’s the phone. Or you can turn it off off, and then you’ll never know that you won that voucher for a free glass of champagne the next time you’re at Charlie’s, because of course you never check your messages.*** But this does at least mean that when you’re lying at the bottom of the muddy ravine you can ring someone with a rope ladder.†
BlueRose
Your comment about the phone lines always being bad . . . unless you have had fibre installed then your broadband is sent over your copper phone lines . . . if your standard phone line is crappy due to interference, then that has a direct affect on your broadband performance, it will likely manifest as random disconnects all over the place and sometimes trouble getting connected.
Also I recommend getting a powerfilter . . . it may spike badly enough over time to damage your router or anything else electrical plugged into it.
SIIIIIIIIIGH. . . . I thought I’d talked about this before. Well, I probably have, but given the several gazillion words that have passed over this opening page in the last few years. . . . Anyway. Yes, I know. This entire area sucks for landline service, and the wiring in my little cul de sac makes linemen burst out laughing and have to grab hastily at their poles before they fall off. This is probably sixty years old, one of them told me, wiping the tears of mirth off his face. There is not a thing I or any other mere citizen can do about it. It’s all owned by British Telecom and they don’t give a flying bugger. BT, just by the way, and I know I’ve told this story, informed me, when I tried to get Third House plugged back in a few years ago††, that there was no phone line to that house and I would have to pay several hundred pounds to have it installed. Pardon me. This is a 1930’s cottage in the centre of town and there is a phone jack in the kitchen. But that’s the kind of thoughtful, efficient mega-mono-incredible-o gigantic-o national corporation it is. There are regular rumours that we’re going to have our broadband area-wide upgraded—although meanwhile it’s getting worse because of all the new build and new people and more of them wanting broadband—but I’ll frelling believe it when I frelling see it, and even when it happens it’s not going to happen to my cul-de-sac till the very, very, very, very, very, very end. If they remember it at all. Grrrrr.
And I have a surge protector. I have several surge protectors. I even replace them.
Diane in MN
who uses a landline any more?
Well, I do.
Well . . . so do I. But don’t tell anyone. And my ways around my interference issues are of the tin-foil-hats-to-keep-the-alien-probes-out-of-my-brain level. I don’t care.
Despite the presence of multiple towers in our area, our cell phones are mostly non-functional at the house because we don’t get a signal. I assume we are in a hollow or something.
No. It’s the alien probes. (But don’t tell anyone.) It sodblastingly amazes me how often the old ‘we can’t get a signal’ is trotted out. Our horizons look like angry hedgehogs or secret military intelligence encampments with the numbers of phone masts and at this point most of the people I know—and I would include myself in this sad, misguided number—are addicted to their mobile phones and feel vulnerable and endangered (and cranky) when they can’t get a signal and check their Twitter feed regularly to see if @rhinestoneAllStars or @pinkcentifolia has answered their tweet yet. And it is a monthly wonderment to me—which is to say when the chirpy message about the bill comes in—what I pay for the privilege of . . . sometimes being able to pick up a signal. What is the deal here. And whatever it is I want to upgrade my package.
Ajlr
(We use Skype all the time at work, including holding 10-participant team meetings on it. Mostly, it’s fine.)
I CANNOT BEGIN TO IMAGINE A SKYPE MEETING INVOLVING TEN PEOPLE. I think I have to sit down. Oh, wait, I am sitting down. Maybe I’d better lie down.
Looking forward to hearing about The New Idea.
::Beams::
EMoon
If having us feel tortured with your Mystery Fun was the goal, then yes, I feel tortured. Silent but intense screams of agony are even now wafting across the land between here and the Atlantic and will soon be wafting across the ways, you-ward, to give you the satisfaction of knowing your torture plan was successful.
YAAAAAAAAY. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You cheer me immeasurably.
blondviolinist
::dies of curiosity::
::enters afterlife furious that premature death has prevented her from FINDING OUT WHAT ROBIN WAS TALKING ABOUT!!!::
There, there. Send me a forwarding address. In these digital, immaterial days I’m sure we can work something out.
serenityruler
As for the surprise, I’m intensely interested. Because the reader forum is detached from the blog itself, I’m not sure if the blog exists to create conversation or just to hear from Robin. It has to be her style and humour in the writing seeing as it isn’t excerpts from the books or exclusively book related subjects. Hmmmm….
The blog exists because my agent told me, five years ago, that all authors have blogs these days and I had to have one too. I am naïve. I thought this was more or less the literal truth. Feh. But it was too late by the time I found out she was exaggerating for effect . . . and it is certainly too late now. The blog is supposed to be a marketing tactic. It’s supposed to be getting Robin McKinley, Author, out there as a concept. It doesn’t (said my agent reassuringly) have to be literally marketing. Which is the good part. Unfortunately it—and you—are stuck with what I can do, as I keep saying. Days in the Life are what I can do.
However . . .
* * *
* Ask any of my friends. I Do Not Tease Well. Peter spent years being startled at having his head ripped off and handed back to him.^ I was teasing, he’d say. So? Your point would be? I would respond. Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to, you know, play? he’d say. I’m American, I’d say. Life is real! Life is earnest! Art is long, and Time is fleeting! And our hearts, though stout and brave! Still, like muffled drums, are beating! Funeral marches to the grave!^^ No messing around!
^ Remember we had spent exactly one weekend together when we decided to get married. There were lots of surprises.
^^ http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-psalm-of-life/ Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin College. But Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is like this great informing spirit in my life. He’s not alone, mind you, but he’s sure as hell there. Great thundering humourless New England patriarchal Puritan thug. The Protestant frelling work ethic. Get me the Katahdin out of here.
Mind you, I do have time for Longfellow, possibly because (last I knew, maybe he’s come back), he is Not Fashionable. I am (almost) always willing to give a fellow unfashionable an extra break. Maybe it’s just that I went to Bowdoin. And am sort of from Maine. But Paul Revere? Hiawatha? Totally. I’m not at all sure that there’s much of Longfellow you can read for the first time as a grown-up without deciding you’d rather be weeding the cat or painting the dishwasher, but when I was a kid those stories with their fancy metrical shimmy were hot fudge sundaes with extra sprinkles.
** ::trembles and looks around anxiously::
*** Ask me how I know the never-checking-messages part.
† How I’m going to attach hellhounds to my body for the ascent I don’t know, but I’ll worry about that after the person with the rope ladder answers their phone.
†† It had stood empty long enough that the phone got turned off.
Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology
So a friend and I have been trying to figure out something new and amusing to do for the blog. * It had got to the point by this week that we really needed to do a kind of run-through to see if it was going to work**, but I’ve been ill*** and she has, like, a job and a life† and scheduling has been a ratbag. But we finally decided we could do it this morning.
The first thing that happened is that I overslept. SO WHAT FRELLING ELSE IS NEW.†† So when I finally texted my friend (as prearranged) she had also overslept††† arrgh arrgh arrgh arrgh so we both stumbled around finding caffeine (and clothing) and feeding/hurtling domestic fauna and so on. As one does.
Articulateness was beginning to emerge from the enshrouding mists. Blah. Gar. We were tentatively going to do this by Skype instant messaging, but we were going to have a video-enabled chat about what we were trying to do first, in so far as I was capable of either speaking audibly‡ or hearing anyone speaking to me.‡‡
The first thing that happened was that we couldn’t get Skype to talk to us. . . . No, wait. The first thing that happened was that Pooka was doing one of her little, Message? Me? Message?, deals, so my friend had texted back and I’m wondering why she hadn’t because it wasn’t showing. Eventually I went hunting and there were like three new ones the last one being, Hey, where r u? ARRRRGH. It’s sort of the modern tech version of catching your roommate with the empty plate in her hands and the crumbs on her face: Chocolate cake? What chocolate cake?‡‡‡
Then, having re-established contact by text . . . Skype refused to connect. R u there? yes im here where r u . . . note that there are two iPhones, a Macbook and a desktop PC involved, and we are playing merry, merry musical gadgets . . . eventually Skype acknowledged both my and my friend’s existence at the same time on one machine each and a sort of connection was established . . . except she couldn’t hear me, I couldn’t see her, and I was getting a helpful pop-up message saying ‘your broadband is moving at a somewhat slower than measurable rate. Glaciers are faster. Liver flukes are evolving into diplodocuses while we wait for the signal from the historic maypole on your cul-de-sac. We don’t hold out a lot of hope for this conversation you’re trying to have.’
Eventually my friend and I gave up on the preparatory chat option. She was still trying to reassure me (we were still texting, mostly successfully) that Skype IM was really easy, nothing could go wrong. Yes. And I’m the queen of Sheba. My Skype kept claiming that my friend was off line. My friend kept claiming that her Skype was telling her I was off line. Shifting from one demonic piece of kit to another of course aggravates the situation. I could sit there watching Pooka and the desktop pointing fingers at each other and saying: She did it!§ I turned everything off and then turned it back on again. Skype was now claiming I was back on line, but I wasn’t allowed to change my status. I WAS GOING TO BE ON LINE FOREVER.§§
At this point I received another text from my friend. Ur still off line, it said. ARRRRRRRRRGH, I replied. R u near ur landline? she next inquired (crisply). I’m going to phone u.
Somebody tell me why I could hear her laughing through her texts.
Um, I texted back, yes. But I nvr use it because connection ALWAYS bad.
She phoned me while I was standing in the middle of the office floor at the cottage, watched with some interest by relaxed and half-asleep hellhounds, and swearing like an entire regiment of troopers from low backgrounds, trying to UNTANGLE the frelling WIRING between the phone and the message machine§§§ and between the machine and the wall, which, because I never use any of it, mats itself into plastic dreadlocks. HOW DOES IT DO THIS. IT SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE. PLASTIC FRELLING FLEX CANNOT FRELLING FELT ITSELF. Sure it can. It’s like how coathangers breed in empty closets. When the phone went BRIIIIIIIIIIING the way cheap landlines still do I was so startled I dropped the whole mess.
We had the conversation. She got me on Skype. She got me on Skype’s Instant Messaging, which was hiding. No, really. We had our run-through. Our idea works.
Mwa hahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, this is going to be fun.#
Stay tuned.
* * *
* This is a long story which I’m about to start torturing you with hints about. But for tonight, it’s just murky, inscrutable background.^
^ Mwa hahahahahaha
** Okay, maybe I’m starting to torture you now.
*** You may have noticed.
† She does stuff like hang out. There aren’t even any handbells involved. I really don’t understand why we’re friends. I suppose we each provide the other with variety in her social relationships.
†† I’m not sleeping through the alarm. It’s just I keep putting it back as I thrash and flounce and periodically notice that another hour has gone by and I’m still not asleep. I don’t like missing half the day this way, but I like even less not being able to use ANY of the day because I’m too tired. Conventionally the phrase ‘her blood ran like fire through her veins’ sounds exciting. She’s just caught sight of her true love—or possibly he/she has his/her tongue down our heroine’s throat and his/her hand, um, but I don’t usually write those stories—or her enemy on the battlefield. Something is going to happen. Something other than our stupid heroine being unable to find a comfortable position to sleep in her sodding unenchanted bed in her sodding unenchanted cottage in her sodding unenchanted little town. ARRRRRRGH. I will never feel the same about that phrase. Also, I need to be able to breathe.
††† She also has a lurgy. SHE’S FIVE THOUSAND MILES AWAY. I DIDN’T GIVE IT TO HER.
‡ See: Lurch. Or a really really bad recording of Paul Robeson.
‡‡ This didn’t stop me hearing my ex-bells this morning. Sigh.
‡‡‡ I shouldn’t say things like this. Next time Pooka will eat them.
§ Yes. They both had chocolate cake crumbs on their faces.
§§ Note that today’s friend is THE ONLY PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE I EVER SKYPE WITH BECAUSE SKYPE IS ONE THE MANY SO CALLED WONDERS OF MODERN SO CALLED TECHNOLOGY I DO NOT GET ALONG WITH. Hannah and I tried it once. She hated it as much as I did.^
^ Us old people have to stick together. Silver surfers, for godssake. I nearly took myself off the grid permanently when I heard that term for the first time, and went to live in a cabin in the woods with oil lamps and a fireplace.
§§§ Which I also never look at or play back because the connection is so bad I can’t hear what whoever it is is saying and I probably don’t want to anyway, who uses a landline any more?^
^ I give no one Pooka’s number. Peter has it. The archangels have it. Okay, Merrilee, Hannah, and today’s friend have it. Fiona has it. That’s about it.
I don’t like phones, okay? I’ve never liked phones.
# After all, we have Blogmom for the blog. Nobody messes with Blogmom.
Frost
So after a (splendid) weekend of too much champagne and too little sleep and my usual over-effusive Monday, today of course I stayed home and applied myself strictly to work. Of course. Totally. Except for the mmph-mumble hours in the garden. . . .
And there’s going to be a vile, putrescent THRICE BLASTED FROST tonight. Atlas, bless him, who was here today working in Peter’s garden, rang Peter when he got home and had listened to the local weather report—Peter listens in the morning, and I play musical weather apps on Pooka, none of which is worth the 69p or £1.23 I paid for it, but watching a series of them being clueless helps to focus the slowly-waking morning mind. Atlas tends to be right: he lives on a farm, he’s a farmer’s son-in-law, and he knows how to do that sniffing-the-air thing about coming weather. If he agrees with the forecasters, you pay attention. Anyway. I was back in the cottage garden, out of earshot of either Pooka* or the landline** when Peter was trying to call me, contemplating saying the hell with it and planting my sweet peas, which are busy climbing out of the little plastic nets they arrived in, because potting on all those sweet peas is way too daunting a prospect.*** Providentially I was distracted by the six or a dozen little vases of things on various window sills that have grown roots and are wondering what happens now—I have this bad habit of putting prunings in water, just in case they’ll decide to grow roots: a surprising number of your average house plants will—and speaking of plants climbing out of what they’re in, I think some of my geranium cuttings have learned to abseil: there’s got to be GROUND around here somewhere.
So I was out in the cough-cough-cough potting shed† mixing compost and vermiculite and putting great fuzzy-rooted cuttings†† in small pots till dark.††† And dark is about two hours later than it was a fortnight ago‡. So IT’S SUDDENLY EIGHT O’CLOCK, and I race indoors to slam hellhounds into their harnesses‡‡, discover a phone message from Peter about a frost, howl in a singing-voice-threatening way, furiously put down a plastic sheet in the sitting room since the Winter Indoor-Jungle Table has been put away for the year, and start ferrying stuff through. . . .
We’d better have a frost tonight.
* * *
* For someone who is theoretically attached at the hip to her iPhone, I’m out of range far too often. Most of my friends with iPhones who live in jeans like me keep theirs in a pocket, but noooooooo. Maybe I just wear the wrong jeans.
** This is less surprising since the landline only actually rings when it’s in the mood. Poor Cormac rang the cottage three times before the landline deigned to let us know someone was trying to make contact. Hannah was beginning to worry: Cormac said he’d call around now. . . .
*** I’m saving my potting-on stamina for the 1,000,000,000 dahlia cuttings I always find I’ve ordered. One of the many conundrums of the gardener’s life is ordering early, before the things you particularly want have sold out, but which means you do your spring ordering while winter is clamped over the landscape like a giant iron hand, you’re convinced everything in your garden is dead and you need cheering up, or ordering late, when the mere presence of more daylight is beginning to cheer you up, enhanced by the fact that all kinds of dead things are producing small green (or occasionally red or purple) bumps and nodules^, and you are at least slightly less likely to order enough stuff to overfill Sissinghurst^^. But your nurseries will have run out of several of your absolute favourites without which your summer will be ruined, AND what you do successfully requisition will mostly arrive so late you will have gone to the garden centre and bought too much stuff there because you couldn’t wait any longer. On the whole I do better with choice A but it’s not a perfect system.
^ I’ve got a few gosh golly WOW ::cartwheels of joy:: surprises coming up . . . but I’m afraid to mention them officially for fear such acknowledgment and acceptance will promptly make them die after all.+
+ This probably also goes for mentioning that my snake’s-head fritillaries are coming into bloom. But I’m mentioning it anyway because if I don’t tell you something I will explode. They are slightly fussy, but we grew them at the old house, but I had been having disastrous luck with them for years at the cottage when Ajlr mentioned that the insanely evil red lily beetle also eats fritillaries . . . which I then realised was my problem too. But while I have conclusive evidence that both the weather gods and the unexpectedly-living-plants gods read imprudent blogs, I’m hoping that the insanely evil red lily beetle god does not.
^^ http://www.invectis.co.uk/sissing/
† Which is to say the all-purposes gardening shed, overflowing with pots, pot saucers, trays, tools, buckets of various sizes and materials, bags of compost and fertilizer and boxes and bottles of intensive plant food, my tiny barbeque and attendant charcoal, plastic sheets and fleece, etc etc etc etc ETC ETC ETC . . . and a robin’s nest. I was really excited when I saw that—I haven’t had a nest since the blog’s first year, and have barely had a robin. I know he’s around—there’s always one robin in a garden: they like gardens and they’re territorial—but the blackbirds have become such thugs that he’s kept a low profile. Sadly the nest seems to have been rejected, and I haven’t seen the happy couple in a while . . . but one robin is very much in evidence. I also spent time I might have been spending planting sweet peas hoicking out frelling mats of crocosmia and lily-of-the-valley^ around Queenie and Souvenir de la Malmaison and I had a small feathered opportunist at my elbow. I was reminded that when you’re outdoors the whirr of small flapping wings is quite pleasant.
^ Which are WEEDS in my garden. Bullying invasive WEEDS.
†† I also had one of my moments of hilarity and decided to do the full soft-wood cuttings nonsense from an obstinate house plant that has refused to die, the gallant thing, but needed serious pruning when I repotted it. Sometimes obstinate plants can be very obstinate and what the hell. It’s only a pot, a plastic bag and some vermiculite. To give it any chance at all, I used hormone rooting powder. This is a story about egregiously bad design. The pot of rooting powder—which was simply on the shelf in the store, it’s not like I did a customer comparison^ or anything—is wider than it is tall, possibly to make the whole show short enough to fit on an average shelf, since it has a dibber^^ built into the cap like a slightly distrait unicorn’s horn. It also has a child-proof cap which is too wide to get your hand around to squeeze. And I have big hands with long fingers. I had to use the sticky-jar opener^^^ to get the frelling thing open. The end of the dibber is also the lid, right? Which means it’s also . . . never mind it’s too wide to get a proper grip on, you don’t need a proper grip to make holes in compost. But because the lid is so frelling vast you’re busy destroying your previous hole, or knocking over your sad confused cutting, while you’re trying to make the next hole. . . .
^ I save that colossal time-suck for things like electric blankets. I think I mentioned that mine died a few days ago. I was hoping the frosty nights were over for the year.
^^ Or dibble. A long pointy thing that makes holes in the ground/compost for you to put seeds or cuttings in.
^^^ I have the vicious-with-teeth variety, none of these wussy rubber rings.
††† Muttering to myself, as I have been doing for seven years now, about getting the frelling shed wired. Which would be dangerous for a lot of reasons, none of them to do with electrocution.^
^ What do you mean it’s midnight and neither I nor the hellhounds have had dinner yet?+
+ Nor written the blog?#
# If hellhounds would like to try, they are welcome.
‡ One genuine, one fraudulent.
‡‡ There have been little faces at the kitchen door increasingly often for the last hour or two. . . .
Technology and gardening
Gardening wins.*
Pooka, as previously observed, has a battery life that is always looking for bridges to jump off of. I’d wound her back up to one hundred percent last night before I went to bed. This morning I had errands to run (with attendant hellhounds) so we were a good twenty minutes into our hurtle before I was ready to plug in for my top-up of Japanese**. I stuck the headphone jack in, turned her on . . . and discovered she was down to ELEVEN PERCENT. This is about twelve hours after she’d been at 100% and the first time I’d turned her on.
Meltdown.***
Upon calm, considered reflection, I think what happened is this: I am still gnawing away at this app that refuses to download off my computer and onto a device where I can frelling use it. Preferably the iPad. So last night, in bed with Astarte†, I asked her technology what the problem was, and she claims she needs an update. I looked at the specs in the app store and . . . okay, requires IOS 5. Feh. But . . . I’m a little freaked by the update thing after the first time I updated Pooka she froze so solidly I needed an archangel to unfuse her again. I do get ‘wanna update?’ messages on Pooka occasionally, and I’ve been ignoring them till I have a list of stuff and it’s worth sacrificing an Eveready bunny rabbit and examining its entrails for the perfect time to supplicate the archangels. I have received no such blandishments for/from Astarte. I didn’t know there were any iPad updates.
THIS IS A STUPID SYSTEM.
But it’s even stupider than that, if I’m right about what happened. Because when I turned Pooka on today, and found her trying to redline on me (again), there was a little message box saying, ‘This app won’t download without an update. Retry?’ So I assume what happened is that my fossicking around in Astarte’s innards somehow woke up the equivalent gremlin in Pooka’s, which started blindly trying to download this frelling app. Again. And again. And again. And again. All night long. All morning long. Till I turned Pooka on and interrupted the endless, useless, ridiculous loop, just before she sizzled herself out into exgizmo-hood and became a pink paperweight.
THIS IS A REALLY, REALLY STUPID SYSTEM.††
However, I did get out into the garden for maybe two hours this afternoon which was excellent. Foiled of my gladiolas††† I got all my pansies planted, the snowdrops I never quite got around to planting in the ground last year‡, and potted on a rhododendron and a day lily. By this time it was pretty well pitch dark out . . . but one of the advantages of a tiny garden you know very well after seven years is that you can pretty much garden by feel. Ow. Mostly.
* * *
*I can truly not suppose
A gizmo lovely as a rose.
With apologies^ to Joyce Kilmer.
^ But not very many. It’s a dire poem. ‘A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/ Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast’? Huh? I cannot help but think, in my vulgar, literal-minded way, that the anatomy here is suspect especially when you also have a tree wearing a nest of robins in her hair a stanza or two later. EWWWWWW. This one’s right up there with that other paradigm of poetic inspiration: ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot’. Lovesome? Since the second line cites roses, if in a meretriciously plonking manner, it pains me to reject it, but it would pain me even more to keep it around.
This, however, almost makes it worthwhile: http://wordsmith.org/words/godwottery.html Godwottery. Indeed. A word for regular use.
** I was going to try to figure out ratbag in katakana for you, which is the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words, but I still haven’t got the Japanese writing system(s) installed on this computer yet^, and furthermore I’m reasonably sure WordPress will have a nervous breakdown. We’ll try it some evening. But not tonight.
^ One of my sources says it’s easy. Me and technology? Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
*** Ee, ah, eeee, ah, eeee aaah, eeee ah. Standing in the middle of a country lane, singing at my smartphone while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me. Are there no depths to which eccentric artistic types will not plunge? Speaking of batteries and bridges. Yes, someone saw/heard me. They’re moving out of town tomorrow.
† You may take that any way you please. If you prefer you can replace it with: in bed with Chaos and Darkness.
†† It’s official. In the McKinley Standard, Apple is every bit as stupid as alternative OS technology.
††† Planting my glads, that is. Which are now instead in a tense, slightly gravity-defying huddle on top of the little refrigerator, since Atlas did take the Winter Table down today and I haven’t got any place to put them.^ However Hannah and I will be able to sit at the kitchen table at the same time. But I hope there isn’t a fire drill. And you have to open and close the refrigerator door gently.
^ He also found several more potential bat ingresses to block up.
Diane in MN
And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed. Just in case.
Hopefully you have ordered a nice supply of garden mesh for your guest, too. Just in case.
I did think of it, but I decided against it. My bed is a four poster—the infrastructure is already in place for swathing and swaddling. Not so the fold-out sofa. And I boggled at the idea of buying the agricultural frame for the mesh to drape over. There is a lack of ground to stick the pegs in, in my sitting room, you know? If I find myself inconveniently bebatted I will either escort my gibbering, hand-wringing visitor to Third House at an unseemly hour as necessary^, or she can spend the rest of that night in the other side of my bed^^ and spend the next night at Third House.
I knew there was a reason I bought a third house.
^ You do get used to small furry flying visitors, as you will remember from last year, but they do remain startling when you find one in bed with you.
^^ After I clear books, journals, iPads and/or hellhounds to make space
‡ Snowdrops’ unwillingness to thrive in pots is exaggerated.