gardening adventures

close up of caladium and calla lilies eeking through
caladium with some calla lily leaves peeking through

Gardening as a hobby is not for the weak of heart. Like you, dear reader, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. Zoom meetings and such in this pandemic (has history assigned a name for this yet?) have been merely a distraction from staring vapidly at dumb television shows and deep sighing when I accidentally stumble into the news cycle.

So, I turned to gardening.

I don’t actually know what I’m doing

I am surprised at just how much I have grown as a gardener. Oh, I’ve flirted with growing things in the past. I had strawberries and blueberries, roses and more roses. A beautiful lawn. And a very nice and very gifted lawn guy who helped me get everything under control once or twice a year. By helped I mean he did a lot of it.

Also, those big lawn stores sell pretty foolproof plants, so I’ve never actually grown impressive things from seeds until now. Every little germinated seed is an occasion for celebration. Allow me to share some of the pretty plants I’ve been able to keep alive this spring:

Feeling ever so confident in my incredible skills as a gardener, I very carefully and lovingly nurtured back to life a batch of oregano that had dried up and gone dormant over winter. I watered and tended it throughout the warm spring days, making sure it was getting plenty of sun. In time, I had a wonderful green batch of oregano ready to dry.

I showed it off to a friend who recently came over for a visit on our porch.

a boring old weed
My Precious

She took one look at it and deadpanned: Congratulations. You’ve done a fine job … of raising weeds.

There’s a good lesson in this

There’s nothing like a weed garden to grow in humility. I’m not even mad about it, so I’ll keep it. I’m counting my successes where I can get them!

Have you tried new hobbies or activities recently?

earbuds in the new junk drawer

Samsung? I have an iPhone.  Spontaneous generation?
Samsung? I have an iPhone. Spontaneous generation?

When I was growing up, the junk drawer in the kitchen was filled with ballpoint pens. Cheap clicky pens with advertising on them. U.S. government skillcraft pens that looked super cheap, but wrote beautifully. And a collection of those orange-yellow Bic pens without their caps. Naturally, there was a collection of caps that didn’t fit any of the pens.

None of them wrote. I know this because I often saw my mother with the telephone nestled into her shoulder while she warmed the tip of a dried up pen with one of my dad’s lighters. My mom had some skills — she often pulled the phone line taut to reach the drawer, so adding just a little more tension would have launched the phone back toward the wall — but it never happened. She managed to keep the caller entertained while holding the pen and paper in one hand, and flipping the cap off the lighter and getting it to ignite without setting fire to the paper or her eyebrows. Miraculously, she’d squeeze a little ink out of that dead pen.

Then she’d put it back in the junk drawer.

I’m convinced the 21st century version of dead ball point pens is the earbud. Or earbuds — I suppose they come as a pair. My junk drawer has a bunch of pairs — with gross metal facing that is rusting (or worse — is that…is that earwax? gross.)

I find buds everywhere. There are half a dozen on my desk, some neatly wound, others in a tangle, a couple still in their pretty little boxes, unused. Pristine.

None of them are the kind I like, and every last one of them will be used, begrudgingly, because the good ones I bought last year have gone missing. I was so annoyed I stopped listening to my podcasts.

I finally got tired of punishing myself. Now I just punish my ear canal with the cheap earbuds. They are everywhere. Especially in the junk drawer.

What’s in your junk drawer?

 

 

this conversation happened…

Hubs: Hey, what are those cute little animals in Star Wars?

Me: …Ewoks?

Hubs: No, you know, those cute little furry things you can pet.

Stunned silence…

Me: Tribbles? Are you talking about Tribbles?

Hubs: Yes!

More stunned silence…

Me: That’s from Star Trek.

Hubs: Whatever, you know what I mean.

GASP

Me: No. Not even, but what about Tribbles?

Hubs: I saw a video of the cutest animal that looks like those.

He was talking about this:

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