Climbing · the · Third · Stair

Over the past year my old but trusty CD player in the living room had developed a serious skipping problem. At first I thought it was the disks, but then I realized that those same disks played just fine on the really cheap player I have in the kitchen, so that probably wasn't it. This left me with it being the CD player. It being unlikely to fix itself, I realized that I was going to have to get over my disinterest in how any of my electronic toys worked and figure out what the problem was and what I needed to do to have it not be a problem. I hated this, but as I lack a boyfriend to foist stuff like this onto I would have to do it myself.

After googling I determined that the most likely (and, happily, easiest to fix) cause was that my CD lens was dirty. It had never before occurred to me that the insides of a CD player needed to be cleaned, and given that I've had this unit for years and years I had to acknowledge that it was probably in desperate need of care. More investigation showed that basic cleaning was easy: you bought a special kind of CD cleaning disk, played it in the machine, and you were done.

Getting the CD was easier said than done. Between my work schedule, the location of the nearest electronics store, and the deficiencies of the Lincoln city bus system, I spent over two months thinking, "I'll surely be able to pick it up next week" and not picking it up. Last week I gave up and ordered it off of Amazon. (You want to stop losing my sales tax money, Lincoln? Get worthwhile public transit!)

The disk arrived yesterday, and as soon as I got home I took it out of the box, studied the directions, and put it into the CD player. I played it the prescribed 20 seconds, took it out, and put in Chris Whitley's Living with the Law, one of the CDs that had skipped the worst. On the first song it stuttered in a few places, but there were no outright skips. I put the cleaner for another cycle, then again played Living with the Law. No skips, no stutters.

Victory!

Now I can start planning soundtracks for my Judgement Night game again.

Friday I got home from work and, after some delay (as in, I laid down for a nap) I went out and worked in my garden for a bit. I got the northern tip of it weeded (mostly) and planted a new round of spinach, lettuce, and turnips. The turnips are mostly for greens; with summer coming on I don't have high hopes of getting any good roots. But I have lots of seeds, and turnip greens are tasty.

Saturday I got dressed after breakfast and went out for more work. Normally I prefer to do garden work in the afternoon, but we had rain rolling in midmorning and if I was going to get any gardening done at all this weekend I would have to hustle. I weeded and turned over more of the garden, and got some lima beans and three kinds of snap beans planted before the rain showed up. Just in time: the first drops came down while I was still planting beans! I would have liked to get more work in, but at least everything got watered in well.

And maybe it's best that I didn't have time to put more seeds in the ground: I still need to make the final call on where my tomatoes, peppers and squash are going to go. One hill will go at the far south end, where the potatoes are now: as the squash grows bigger and starts encroaching on the potatoes I can harvest them. Not sure where anything else will go! I have more squash varieties than I have room, so some prioritizing is in order. Part of me is tempted to throw some seeds on the compost pile out back and see what happens.

Sunday the ground was wet, so I didn't even bother to pretend to work in the garden. It was cloudy until around 5 pm, and when the sun finally came out I grabbed some yarn and went to sit on the front steps of the porch. I sat there, crocheting and admiring my garden, for a long time.

Dear Future Self: At some point when you look at this journal and wonder why the long silence, know that during this period you had a lot of very stressful things going on in your life, and you weren't particularly interested in spending time writing them all down. That just adds to the stress!

However, some pleasant things have been happening, so I am going to talk about that for awhile.
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I came home from work and laid down for an hour. This is a bad habit I'm trying to break, on the principle that I could get more accomplished if instead of laying down I sat down and did some crochet or read a book, but I'm getting cranky with myself over how much stuff I need to get done each week and how I should be productive every single minute of the day.

Eventually I got up and changed into gardening clothes (by which I mean a t-shirt and a ripped pair of jeans) and got out to do some work in my garden. I spent about an hour and a half weeding, something that it really needed. There's more to be done, but now at least it looks more like a garden-in-progress and less like an abandoned lot. I'm somewhat depressed over it, still. I had ambitions of being able to feed myself home-grown vegetables from Memorial Day to Labor Day and everything is still so small I don't think I'll have anything harvestable on the 27th. It's a cold spring when collards, radishes, and spinach you planted at the end of March are only an inch tall on May 20th. On the bright side, all my potatoes are up and looking very strong, so at least I won't lack for potatoes.

I'm being tempted by the latest BPAL update--a Lunacy (Honey Moon) and three single notes (Passionflower, some patchouli, and Wild Dandelion). OK, so the patchouli isn't a threat and I managed to talk myself out of Honey Moon and Passionflower, but the Dandelion intrigues me. I'm enough of of a plant nerd to know that dandelion flowers don't have much in the way of scent, so this will be the PBAL perfumer's imagination of a dandelion, which means it could be anything. I find this weirdly attractive. The problem with this is that their postage is so high I flatly refuse to buy only a single bottle from them, so I need to decide if there is anything from the general catalog I want enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. This in turn needs to be balanced against the plane tickets I need to be buying soon and oh yeah, I do keep claiming I want a bicycle for transportation. Choices, I have them.

It's Mayday, and the weather forecast has a 90% chance of rain, snow, and sleet today. This isn't incredibly outrageous in Nebraska--Lincoln's frost-free date is May 15--but it is inconvenient. I don't know what to plant right now in my garden, it's too wet and cold to get into the garden if I did, and my bedroom is practically impassable because I'm stuck with both my cold-weather and warm-weather clothing in play.

Of the seeds I planted earlier in the month, the brassicas all sprouted almost immediately. As I was stuck home then with sinus issues this was cheering. The tomatoes started showing life a week later, and today I noticed that some of my peppers were sprouting. I'll need to dig out my notebook to figure what varieties I have, but being able to have any tomato and pepper plants without buying sets makes me happy.

Because I was worried about viability, in some cases I dropped two tomato seeds into the little peat pellet and so now have two plants growing in the same space. In the interest of science I've decided to let them both grow a bit, and then snip one off, plant it in some fresh potting soil, and see if I can get it to root. If it succeeds I have another plant to give away, and if it fails I've lost nothing.

I'm dithering over a BPAL order. Today is the last day to order the April eclipse blend and the sweet alyssum single note, so I need to decide quickly. It's a lot of money for scents I can't try beforehand, even when one takes into account their trade potential. On the other hand, the eclipse blend would be a chance to see if I like how BPAL handles patchouli. On the third hand, it' looks like I'll be swapping for a patchouli-containing floral, so maybe I should just save my money. I should, after all, be saving for a bicycle. Not to mention the two Lamy Al-Stars I've decided I want. It's nice that my financial health has improved to the point I can have problems like this, but I could want to be better at making up my mind.

This afternoon I was running around trying to scare up enough clear plastic containers and seed-starting mix to plant seeds in and I discovered that I had five--count them, FIVE--Jiffy mini-greenhouses. I'm not sure if that's what Jiffy calls them, but that's what they are: dark plastic trays with clear plastic dome tops and 25 little peat pellets for starting seeds in. You water the pellets, stick the seeds in, put the clear lid on to keep everything moist and wait for your seeds to sprout. I had picked them up at some end-of-season clearance and forgotten about them until I was searching my sun room for potting soil.

I did not use all five of them; even my lunacy does not extend to starting 125 plants in one day. I stopped at 3: one of various tomatoes, one of various peppers, and one of various brassicas. That's waaaay more tomatoes and peppers than I need, but since I'm using old seeds I have some viability worries--best to start extras, and give away what I can't use. The brassicas include seven broccoli, despite me having four in the garden already, because this April's weather has been so weird I'm worried about it surviving. Sure broccoli can take a little snow, but can it take snow after it's been rained on for two days? I have no experience with these kinds of questions.

While eating lunch I was reading the BPAL forum and found the thread with carnation recommendations. I am in need of a good carnation scent! One of the perfumes that kept coming up was The Bow and Crown of Conquest, which had both carnation and leather notes. I had gotten a free imp of it from the lab in a previous order, tried it on, and hadn't been impressed. This had saddened me because it has an awesome name, and I'm easily moved by that kind of thing. (Writer, what can I do?) Inspired by this new information I dug out the imp and really slathered a patch on my arm to try it again.

Apparently, this is one of those scents that I can't dab on and expect to smell anything of it: it needs coverage. But it does smell nice! I can't pick out the carnation but there is a classy floral hanging out with the leather. I, um, ordered an imp of Whip (rose and leather) as part of last week's BPAL order, so now I am even more curious about how it will turn out. I like Bow and Crown of Conquest, but if I like Whip will I really need two floral-and-leather perfumes? (On the other hand, it's not like I am not accumulating a complete wardrobe of rose scents...) And would I really admit to be wearing something called Whip in public? Bow and Crown of Conquest is unwieldy, but tactically safe.

The things I end up worrying about...

A few weeks ago the landlord trimmed up the apple trees in the yard and left a pile of the branches sitting next to the street for the trashmen to pick up. I gathered up a few of the twigs, took them inside, stuck them in a vase of water, and waited. I now have a vase of blooming apple-blossom twigs in my living room, and yes that is just a delightful-looking as it sounds.

That's pretty much all the good news in my life right now. I'm behind and buried in about every facet of my life (work, housework, writing, gardening, reading, crocheting), and feeling borderline sick from my sinuses, which are being constantly irritated by the rainy weather fronts that keep sweeping through. Naturally this meant that I needed to spend yesterday afternoon sorting though my PBAL perfumes (how did I manage to get so many?) and deciding what I needed to swap away. (Less than an hour after I posted my swaps list I found someone who was willing to trade a bottle of Peacock Queen 2007 for my Pink Snowballs 2011, so I guess you could say some good came from that.) (I was really crestfallen over how unimpressive Pink Snowballs was on me; from its description (pink roses and vanilla) it should have been brilliant. I'm beginning to suspect that whatever accord PBAL uses for 'pink roses' doesn't agree with me, because Two, Five, and Seven didn't work well either.)

It's bright and sunny today, after days upon days of clouds/rain/snow/etc. I've decided to cast aside writing worries for a few hours and do dishes and get some seeds started. I went without garden tomatoes last year, and I really don't want to repeat that. I don't want to buy plants this year either, not with my embarrassingly large collection of vegetable seeds.

I'm trying not to think about the rest of the week. Doing that means taking stock of all I have to do and the time I have to do it in, and that's the path to despair.

But at least my latest BPAL order has shipped. And my rpg game on Thursday should be fun (if I can somehow find the time to prep for it). And if I can hold everything together until Saturday I get to go out for dinner with a group of friends.

But not having all the paperwork I need to file my taxes, and also not knowing who I need to contact to get that paperwork, is a real strain. I think I will be forced to file for an extension this year, to get myself more time to flail about in. :-(

The weekend is ending and my apartment is messier than when it started. I'm not pleased with this, though I'm not sure what I could have done differently.

I got a lot of laundry done on Saturday, but a good part of that day got eaten up by my trip across town to pick up my new glasses. It should have taken two hours less than it did, but Lincoln's reduced bus service on Saturdays can really mess you up. But I have my new prescription sunglasses now, along with (I blush to admit) some nice-looking carved wooden crochet hooks.

On Sunday my Big Thing was working in my garden. This year I have the goal of growing almost all of the vegetables I eat between Memorial Day and Labor Day, which means I need to not waste growing days. Today I got the garden tidied up a bit (thankfully, dead sunflowers are relatively easy to pull out of the ground) and then planted a lot of peas, broccoli, and potatoes. I was surprised by the number of potatoes, as I had only bought a couple of three different varieties, but once you have sliced the larger ones up it ends up being a bunch of potato starts. Oh, I also moved one of my miniature roses from the south end of the garden (where it keeps getting shaded out by the goldenrod) to the north end, where it joins my other miniature in my Mary garden. I'm not sure if I used the correct, professionally approved methods for moving a rose, but I figure mini roses are tough--it will probably pull through.

I didn't get any radishes or greens planted, but some of my kale and collards overwintered from last year, so I should get one last harvest there. And radishes and greens are quick to grow, so waiting a week or so isn't critical. And it's raining right now, with more to come later in the week, so the soil will be nice and moist when I do plant my seeds.

One thing I want to do differently than past years is make a dedicated effort to grow more flowers. This might seem counter-intuitive when I'm also trying to grow more veggies, but flowers make the whole garden nicer to look at, and if I stick mostly to edible flowers I can use them in salads.

I posted this on FB earlier this week, but I have some writerly friends who are not on that and who might be amused by it, so I'm putting it here as well.

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How Nancy's writer!brain works.
1. Notice flyer for lecture on gun violence.
2. Examine picture on flyer to see if I recognize type of gun
3. Decide it probably isn't a M1911 variant, but would not bet money on it
4. Notice it is being held left-handed.
5. Become irritated at having a picture of a right-handed gun being held left-handed.
6. Wonder how left-handed people deal with right-handed guns.
7. Wonder if any of my NPCs are left-handed.
8. Wonder how I can construct a plot around an NPC being left-handed.