I’ve been more than remiss in communication.
As you may know I had round #2 with cancer–breast cancer—which I got out of with a lumpectomy and no complications, but — radiation, etc. and as many as 8 doctor visits a month….which kind of takes the starch out of you. Just not enough energy to get to things….
And ‘things’ have sadly included WWAS….FB’s been a little easier, because there I just react.
But WWAS has been, well, — I haven’t had the energy to spare. I was going great guns on the next book until the second cancer round, and I’m ABOUT getting enough energy to take it up again—but—
Anyway, still love you all. It’s just been weird. I’ve always had energy to spare, and it’s hard to pace myself when I don’t.
Not for want of caring.
Best to all of you. Profound apologies for those who’ve tried to get onto this page that I haven’t had the strength to go through (literally: I’m not kidding: 14,000 emails (most from Russia and Albania) to try to sort out legitimate new members. I hate loose bots! Anyway, I’m doing all right, trying to bounce back from the second bout and the radiation, just not as much spring in the bounce as I used to have; and hoping that I won’t have a third. Genetics says I have a proclivity to this kind of problem—but I think I’ve had my statistical share now, if you please!
Love you all.
—CJ
A couple of weeks ago we got a notice form the County requiring us to clean up the brush in our yard, especially around the fence lines. I’ve been working on it for the past few months, and suspect my pace wasn’t fast enough for the crabby neighbor who probably made the complaint, so I bit the bullet and hired a landscape company to clean it up for me. I spent a chunk of yesterday cutting out a bunch of tree limbs for them to haul away. Between that and the brushy grasses, I think we’ll have several truck loads to go to the green waste recycling place.
This year has been a remarkably hurricane-y one, thanks to a Godzilla sized El Nino. Mother Nature got tired of throwing stuff at Hawaii and has gone back to pummeling Mexico. Meanwhile the one hurricane so far on the Atlantic side has been a doozy, chewing its way up through the Florida panhandle and surrounds. Please, everyone in those areas, stay safe!
So far no worries about the Atlantic hurricane hitting up here in the Boston area, although looks it to be raining much of this week (not a bad thing and raining right now too). I just took a peak at the longer -range weather forecast, which is predicting a low of 35 F. next Saturday morning. That will be annoying, if the prediction holds as it would come close to freezing my plants. I still have tomatoes ripening and the fig and lemon trees outside. While I can haul the lemon to its winter home if I have to (in our enclosed East facing front porch), the fig tree still has all its leaves and many upripened figs I’m hoping ripen in the coming weeks… so I had better make plans to cover my plants Friday night, if predictions hold. Generally, if I can dodge the first frost of the season, we’re good for another few weeks of warmer temperatures.
Well, apparently last night’s rain that I mentioned above was the remnants of Hurricane Isaiah… but it had so down-graded from a fearsome event that it wasn’t even a tropical storm or particularly windy. But we did get over an inch of rain, which was nice for the ground and gardens as a whole. Unfortunately, the rain didn’t reach up to Northern Maine, which is in the grip of a major drought. Pity.
*Imagines Raesean’s fig tree in a puffy jacket!*
More cleanup coming, to beat the threatened County deadline. I’ve started bagging my leaves and grass, because it needs to at least be contained and it won’t all go in the trash by the Oct. 24th deadline. Kid returning to help rake this weekend, and Nov. 2 the same crew who dragged away my last yardful of green waste is coming to take away a truckload of other dump bound material — farewell old couch! adieu, termite-riddled boards! hasta los bye-byes, ripped out carpet strips!
We’re now at the weekend: Friday night turned out to be relatively warm (in the 40s F.) and very windy. Today, Saturday, got up to a high of 62 F. and remained windy. I was outdoors for about 5 hours today doing outreach for Fuel Assistance (my job) at an annual Green Energy Festival the next town over from me. While I managed to stay warm enough (long john undershirt, turtle neck shirt, wool sweater and light jacket.. not to mention my sheepskin earmuffs and gloves by the end, turnout was distinctly depressed compared to other years. Normally there are swarms of people and lots of young kids racing around. Likely it was the cold although the No Kings rallies may have syphoned off some folks (three women did show up with a ”Vote Early!” sign.
Tonight’s weather is going to be a different thing: down to 32 or 34 F. I hope the wind continues as that will help prevent the freezing air from pooling on my plants. While I haven’t dressed my fruit trees in puffy winter parkas, despite Chondrite’s excellent fantasy, I did cover the lemon tree & lemons, fig tree & many unripe figs, a couple tomato plants w/ big green tomatoes still on the branches and one Japanese eggplant with three baby “eggs” I remain hopeful on. I used an old picnic table cloth, a big motorcycle rain cover bag (that blew into our yard one year), a large plastic bag, a big beach towel, a random garbage bag and — in desperation over one remaining, uncovered branch of the fig— a smallish bath towel I filched from the bathroom. The dahlias and zinnia in pots will have to fend for themselves.
That will have to do. I’ll uncover them tomorrow morning and see the results. If my plants can survive tonight, then they should be able to survive outside for at least the next week (nights predicted back in the 40s F.) without a hard frost. At some point I will have to breakdown, concede defeat on the tomatoes and eggplant, haul the lemon tree into the enclosed front porch and lug the fig into the garage for its winter hibernation.
Oops, I should go and bring in the two hanging pots of begonias and maybe the geranium on the ground… and the jade plant, sigh.
S’posed to get that low here in the morning. I threw a tarp over my basil pots. But I’ve also got 6 tiny little sprigs in water, expecting them to root and hoping to baby them through winter in the house as if they were more spider plants.
It indeed went down to freezing last night. Plants looked good this morning when I took the various coverings off, except for a few blasted basil leaves (I should see about rooting some cuttings, Paul, as you are planning to do) but by afternoon the eggplant leaves had curled, despite having been covered and a few of the fig leaves. Lemon looks fine and the tomatoes too. Oddly, my coleus that I didn’t cover and the dahlias too all seem to have come through with no problems.. I had bid the coleuses goodbye when I went in last night, figuring they would be limp and gone come morning. I just ordered a greenhouse “tent” (pop-up style) that I will try moving my lemon and fig trees into for a few weeks. I have 15 or so figs ripening on the fig tree that will be for naught if I move it now into the garage and its winter dormancy period. The lemon tree is so big it is a real bother to haul up the front steps into our enclosed porch for the winter (and all the lemons pop off as we force it through the door): the longer out the better for it.
My father had a little shelter for his fig bush (it never got big enough to be a tree). It was heavy plastic stapled to wood frames, and held together by pins through hinges. Four sides and a top.
You can cover the lemon trees with a lightweight tarp. If it’s going to get seriously cold, you might want to put an incandescent lamp under the tarp.
I just ordered a “pop-up clear plastic greenhouse/tent” that should hold the potted fig tree and the potted meyer lemon tree for a few weeks. I can unzip it (and open a “window’) during the warmer day time but shut it up at night to prevent the worst of the cold air. That should stretch the season a while longer for the figs, which need to ripen. I won’t be able to use it all winter by any means, because a) snow will crumple it and b) once it is consistently here in the 20s and teens F. especially during the day, it would do in the trees. However, I’m happy to bring them in later, just not yet. Also, the “green house” should be good during the early spring and let me bring the fig tree especially out earlier to waken it from dormancy and get a head start on fig-production.
Oh, maybe, 15 years ago I reread the Chanur series. Shortly after that a 5-minute scene at Meetpoint popped into my head, and it wouldn’t leave! (Maybe I should stipulate I’m an Aspie, have a very “bicameral” brain and have become quite familiar with my mute right-brain.) Nope, the scene kept playing out in my mind, now and then, year after year, stuck. Then about 4(?) years ago I began to write the sequel, “Chanur’s Hunt”. Primarily it was about Pyanfar’s “C-charged rock”, secondarily, “What am I going to do with Hallan?”, not in so many words. I told her about it; she didn’t want to know, of course, but said there’d never be any fanfic. (I guess DAW owns everything Chanur.)
I found the process very, well, wierd! I didn’t have it plotted, no outline; I just sat at the computer and wrote, episodically, chapter after chapter in whatever order they came, realizing gaps. Writing is language; language is “left-brain”. No. When the urge came I’d sit at the the computer appearing to be praying for several minutes, quieting left-brain’s chattering monkey-mind, “It’s language!”, focusing on letting right-brain’s quasi-visual, in a vague way, as if “remembering” something, then left-brain trying to take that down, getting all the pieces, describing what happened. Sometimes it felt like this was a book someone was reading aloud in a parallel universe, and I could vaguely hear most of it. It was mystical.
So now it’s 120K words, with something of a precis and intrduction to characters, for someone unsteeped in the original material, though that’s not “who it’s for”, interspersed references to the two omnibus editions of canon to show it IS within canon. Even a few demonstrative stellar spectra in the directory than might make an appendix.
My mental “bug” has left.
Congratulations! That’s a lot of writing!
(I have an audio-visual mind. For me, it’s writing down what I’m seeing and hearing characters doing. I get scenes, but not plot.)
Time for me to request an inspection by the Fire Marshall and see if they are going to penalize me any for not conforming to what seemed like a very nebulous set of instructions. I’ve pruned, cut, stuffed into bags, lugged to the curb, unthreaded from fences, hired a greenwaste hauler, and done as much as I can in the month they gave me for compliance. One hopes it suffices, as the deadline is Monday.
Is the required cleaning up of brush and “stuff” because it is a fire hazard?
Yes. I got a month to perform the required cleanup; the bottleneck was getting rid of the brush after I cut it down. For the past month, my 55 gallon trash bin has been mostly stuffed full with green waste, and we get pickup twice weekly, which barely dented the accumulation. Hence the green waste pickup. I’ve been reduced to stuffing leaves into plastic bags and filling every one of my bins I normally reserve for bottle and can recycling, to keep it from blowing around once I corral it.
No surprize the county is suddenly more diligent about stuff like that!
Yeah, having a whole town incinerated will do that to you. I had 3 big plywood sheets that were 20+ years old, rather termite-eaten; the original house owner kept them in case they needed to board up a window for a hurricane. I said nuts to this, and made a ‘compost heap enclosure’ out of them, which will at least corral the leaves until I can get rid of them if they won’t decay properly. It’s half full now! Still waiting on the county to do the fire check, although it seems my fenceline will overgrow again before they get to me (if I don’t keep on top of it.) I have one more pickup; it started as a couch only, but the haulers said I may as well fill up the truck, so there goes another bunch of brush.
The county is definitely keeping you busy and in shape!
My spouse and I just got our COVID and Flu shots (Moderna both) this morning… and then went on our busy ways. I put in a 10+ hour work day (it’s the start of the Fuel Assistance winter heating half of the year) although my arm (both shots in the arm I don’t sleep on) started feeling sore by the end. Now that I’m home and relaxed, I’m quite tired and chilled (haven’t turned the heat on yet: we heat with oil) and think I will go join my spouse and te hot water bottle in bed. Hopefully the cat will follow.
I would give serious consideration to a small space heater for times when you just want to warm one room, not the whole house.
Yeah, perhaps… but we’re used to it being cold and hot water bottles are lovely in bed (spouses are too). When I lived in Scotland in my twenties, I had an old and dirt cheap flat (tenement, really) owned but ignored by the University of Edinburgh. It had no heat except a coal fireplace in the kitchen. As coal was relatively pricey—and heavy to carry bags up the three flights of stairs— I mostly kept warm by sitting/sleeping with a hot water bottle and sheepskin or two (also down comforter on the bed) and by doing a lot of baking in the oven. We’ll probably turn on the oil furnace here in November. Electricity prices here in Massachusetts are pretty much the highest in the nation… and space heaters actually draw a lot of electricity. I also foresee a lot of baked rice pudding in my immediate future (3 hours at 300 F.): it’s what I lived on in Scotland too.
A pharmacist at a local Costco where I get my meds on the way home from my doctor’s office gave me one once that I hardly felt. So next time I asked him to do it again, same-o, same-o. I asked. He said the thing is many “injectors” go for the biggest part of the deltoid, getting too close to the shoulder capsule. The trick is to stay well away from it, go farther down toward the tail,