Sculpin

It’s starting to feel like Spring might actually get here after all, even with this cold snap. Josh has been putting together a magnificent bamboo trellis/fence, and I’m making a long list of vegetable, herb, and flower seeds to order. Looks like we’ll be heavy on the legumes this year.

Some of the vegetable contenders: Alderman and Cascadia peas, Tom Thumb lettuce (so cute!), Ura pole beans, yellow scallopini summer squash, and all-blue potato. Shallots, though I’m a little late with those already. No tomatoes this year, I think. Last year’s crop was less than great, and we don’t have many places in the garden that a tomato would do well in, so I’m rotating them out this year. Besides, the farmer’s market practically specializes in good tomatoes.

Herb additions include parsley, cilantro, and garlic chives. Epazote will not be making a repeat appearance this year, unless it’s self-seeded (and I fear it has). That stuff is an acquired taste, and I haven’t acquired it. Yecch.

As for annual flowers, there I’m not so sure. I saved some Cupani sweet peas from last year, so there’s that. As for the rest, uh? Snapdragons? Schizanthus? Calendula? Borage? I’ll probably just take a random stab at some things and see if they grow. I’ve even thought about growing a little flax and experimenting with preparing the fibers, but I’m pretty sure I’d get to the retting stage and forget all about them for months on end.

Speaking of fiber, a while ago I ordered some not-too-pricey extra-fuzzy alpaca wool from Elann.com to test myself for sensitivity. I tied a hunk around my wrist and wore it for a couple of days with no more itching than I’d have had if it were cotton or acrylic. Hooray! So now that I know of a wool that won’t drive me up the wall, I’m thinking about picking up knitting again. It’s been almost ten years since I last tried — I was that bad at it. Really, truly, spectacularly awful, in a way that spoke of my character flaws. My gauge was so tight that if I knit a dishcloth I’d be able to stand it on end; I just couldn’t get myself to loosen up. My scarf was like chain mail. But I’m mellowing out in my old age, and perhaps I am capable of knitting a reasonably good dishcloth and maybe, eventually, something else.

One of my longish-term goals is to learn to ride a bike in traffic and start using it for running errands. After being hit by a van as a pedestrian, I’m fairly cautious about drivers. Cautious, and cynical. And I’ve noticed that the lighting in my neighborhood is not very bright, even on relatively busy streets. It’s hard to see bicyclists here.

So I was interested when Josh came home telling a story about a woman he’d seen with an effective LED safety vest. She got so many admiring requests for information about it, he said, that she’d started carrying around the product’s URL.

Should I start riding around after dark, this is definitely something I’d look into.

This afternoon, I dreamed that my scalp was spontaneously breaking out in Far Side cartoons. (There was one with a bear in an Old West bar, and another with cavemen in their underground research facility.) I am sure this says something profound about my character, but I am not sure what it is.

Josh and I are wrapping up our STP@home at last. I hope to make it to the finish line within two weeks. Josh is about thirty miles behind me, but he could still catch up if I slack off. The race is doing a pretty good job of building my stamina.

Via Salon’s Broadsheet, this strange introduction to a recipe: “As a Southern belle once said, ‘A man can have sex with any woman, but not a good chocolate cake.’” I am not sure I’d want to argue with that.

And via Mind Hacks, an article about a very seriously mentally ill (but hot! oh so hot!) girl whose successful pharmaceutical treatment caused her to gain weight.

“They had removed a stigma of the mind and replaced it with a stigma of the body. It struck him as strange that the patient had been the only one not to worry about a loss that the team around her found so tragic… The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another—in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?”

How it strikes Nia, we’ll never really know. Nia doesn’t have a voice of her own in this article. But it does seem to me that, in her place, I would likely be so relieved at no longer being tormented that worrying over having my features “corrupted” (jeez!) would not be among my immediate priorities. The whole thing had me spitting hot nails. Pandagon has it right: “Can’t we just sedate her and put her in a glass coffin?”

We have heat again! “Cleanest flooded furnace I’ve ever seen,” reported the furnace inspection guy. We were very, very lucky. A little more water, and we would have been replacing the furnace.

This may be just in time to have the power go out if the winds hit again later tonight. I’ve been trying to get stuff done in anticipation of 60-mph winds — cleaning up the patio, pruning, cutting down an outdoor screen before it twists off its hinges, and doing laundry and dishes while we still have hot water. There’s more to do, though, than I’m going to get done.

And while I’m mucking around with these old WPA posters: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Little baby sloths in a box! Awwww.

ETA: finally I remember what they remind me of: the Skog.

So, the crawl space flooded and water got into the furnace. I heard a strange sloshing noise and turned it off at the breaker yesterday. It’s said to be a pretty bad idea to turn it on again before a professional has looked at it. But the professionals won’t look at it until the crawl space is dry — fair enough — and with more rain on the way, who’s to say when that will be? So it’s pretty cold around here. And the dead, sour under-the-house dirt has sifted up into the house, making the place smell like death itself. We’ve got some space heaters, and that keeps the house more-or-less inhabitable if not comfortable.

I sure hope that furnace isn’t fried. We bought it less than three years ago.

I am mildly susceptible to cold-induced asthma, and I’m getting over a cold anyway, so there’s some fairly serious coughing going on here, enough that I’ve pulled a lot of intercostal muscles. (Feels like walking pneumonia, but probably isn’t. I’m watching it, though, I assure you.) I am a mess.

Josh did most of the work under the house yesterday, setting up the pump while I trotted around plugging things in and arranging hoses. His back’s all tied up in knots today from all that stooping and rooting around in chilly, foul-smelling mud puddles. He is a mess.

So Josh and I are feeling very sorry for ourselves. I think Peaceflower is right: it’s a cosmic shitstorm out there. Tomorrow I’ll have to get out of this stinking, freezing house and find some way to cheer myself up. Damn!