Sculpin

Black-capped chickadees seem to be nesting in our hollow old apple tree. I’ve seen two fly in and out of the cavity.

I think that’s the source of a tiny, slightly scratchy clicking sound that’s been driving me half-crazy with curiosity out there in the yard most days this week. I haven’t tried to see the nest because I don’t want to disturb the birds any more than I already do.

I’m drawn to the look of this garden bed lined with bottles. It makes me wonder if I really want to buy a ton of rocks after all. Maybe I should go with wine bottles instead. I wonder if and how they’d affect soil temperature.

We’re going to rebuild and reorient the raised beds any month now, which means that somebody’s got to get the five inches of pebbles out of the path between them. I’ve been working on that very slowly, trying not to be an idiot about it. This has certainly taught me to rough out the paths with something light and compostable first and then maybe put the heavier stuff down later.

The side path is pretty much in. I hope the drainage works out. I probably should have dug the whole side yard out and regraded it so it didn’t trickle water into the bed next to the house, but that wasn’t going to happen this year.

In the very big picture, the garden is moving slowly toward a more permaculture-influenced arrangement. “Low till, low labor” is about my speed, especially when cultivating so much yard. The original landscape was very high-maintenance, especially given our daily use of the side yard: lots of very aggressive growers, several badly placed shrubs, and a cottage garden in front crammed overfull of the sort of plants that look great for a week and then look like somebody sat on them. That won’t do.

Plus, it was a garden designed for somebody very visually oriented, I think; except for some rosemary and lavender, it had little in the way of scent, and it had even less in the way of inviting textures (like fuzzy lady’s mantle or pebbly hardy geranium) or beautiful sounds (like rustling bamboo or the thrum of bees). I’m not like that. Vision is, to me, the least interesting and most impersonal of the senses. Maybe I do get a little ancy for bright color after a long gray winter, but most of the time I’d cheerfully jettison any odorless colorful flower in favor of something more humble-looking that smells or tastes delicious. I do not, in what passes for my soul, understand the popularity of unfragranced roses. No accounting for taste, I guess. I’m fixing the place to reflect mine.

And some plant notes:
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My workout schedule is still not quite killing me, though I’m right at my edge and have exactly no slack at all. I have the involuntary naps to prove it. (Any little virus or anything and I’d have to cut way back.) But it’s having an effect. I am so close to doing an unassisted Pilates Teaser, I can almost taste it. Right now I’ve just got my hands on a bar for balance; in that position, I can pull up my legs and torso well. But when I let go of the bar with both hands, I tip over. So, so close.

Even this limited success is truly amazing. I sort of wish I’d made some record of how incredibly weak, asymmetric, and off-balance I was when I started all this. Just getting my legs into tabletop position was huge. (And not long before that, I was taking baths instead of showers because standing and raising my arms to wash my hair took too much out of me.)

My yoga practice has gotten more powerful, too, these last few weeks. I can do uttitha parsvakonasana, formerly known as “that hell pose”, without even thinking about cussin’.

Josh made us a couple of baked potatoes today. He split mine open and said, “I’ll let you top your potato yourself.”

So I shouted, “Lick my boots!” at the potato.

“What?” exclaimed Josh. “What?” Poor Josh.

“I’m potato-positive,” I explained.

“Who are you and what have you done with my wife?” Oh, pshaw. Like I’m not saying unintelligible things all the darn time.

In other potato news, our seed potatoes arrived from Territorial Seed today, well in advance of my getting the bed ready. (Damn, I’m wildly disorganized lately. I thought they were coming in a couple of weeks.) I’ve been spending my garden time working on putting down cardboard and bark to make a weed-free path in the side yard.

One of these days, I swear, I will get this house and garden under a minimum of control. It drives me crazy that I can’t keep up, and my new extra-insane workout schedule isn’t helping me any. I’m very much on the razor’s edge of overdoing it right now. I’m starting to make a lot of slipups and screwups. But slowly, slowly I’m making some progress on the things that will last, and everything else will have to go hang for a while.

Woman wins first sanctioned mixed-gender professional boxing match on October 9, 1999. It was the first sanctioned mixed-gender match in the history of professional boxing. Margaret McGregor, a landscaper living in Port Orchard, dominated the bout from the first bell and was awarded the victory by unanimous decision.

Coal miners die in an explosion at Newcastle, WA, on October 9, 1894. Dead were George Parrish, age 19; George Dobson, age 21; Charles Giles, age 16; and David Lloyd, age 30.

Some other events:
1000 - Leif Ericson discovers Vinland, becoming the first known European to set foot in North America.
2005 - When Tropical Depression 23 strengthens into Hurricane Vince it makes the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season the first season to use the V name.

And some births:
1967 - Eddie Guerrero, professional wrestler
1971 - Michael Manna aka Stevie Richards, professional wrestler
1892 - Marina Tsvetaeva, bisexual Russian poet, probably not a professional wrestler

Maybe something in me knows that it’s Poetry Month again. I took a nap this afternoon and dreamed a complicated dream about impossible computer problems, and somehow getting a prompt for a machine I didn’t know existed, and then accidentally posting a very long, dull session transcript to somebody’s livejournal… etc. One of the readers of that livejournal chided me in a set of three haiku, which I thought was so charming that I in turn apologized in haiku.

What gets me is that the only one I remember is actually in 5-7-5 form:

In this floating world
Nothing is ever certain
Save computer bugs.

Thank you, subconscious mind!

You know, sometimes I get really sick of being a delicate fucking flower.

I just got back from an abbreviated stint at the gym. Here’s the deal — as you might recall from putting yourself through severe sleep deprivation in college (I certainly do), if you get tired enough, your perceptual abilities go haywire. It may be that your ability to construct a soundscape goes kablooey. In my case, all sounds seem like they come from no more than about a foot away from my head. And it doesn’t take an all-nighter for me to get that tired these days.

I can get to feeling aggressive and frantic after a little while of this, not least because the sounds appear to be originating from a point within my personal space. And while intellectually I know that this is an illusion, my instincts are all fired up to push the noises away. I have to be very careful if I want to function politely when I’m so overloaded. It’s very unpleasant.

Unless, it turns out, I’m at the gym when it’s busy and there’s an aerobics class going on. That’s when “very unpleasant” becomes “eighth circle of hell”. Seriously, folks, I thought I had a solid 50% chance of blacking out or throwing up. I was ready to hit one middle-aged woman over the head with my water bottle just to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. I stuck it out for about fifteen minutes before rushing into the locker room to lie down on a bench. There, at least, the hellish din is sort of muted. I’d become very pale.

I wish I could describe this phenomenon in a way that’d convey its incredible awfulness. To do it justice, I think I’d have to describe an equivalent in the sense of smell. (And I suspect that might put Mrissa at least off her feed!) It’s a lot like that; this aural experience is invasive in the way that a truly terrible smell is invasive. Plus it’s disorienting.

I am never, ever doing that again. I don’t think even earplugs could have made that tolerable. I’ll work out at ten in the morning, or ten at night, but never seven in the evening. Never, never, never.

Anyway. That was exciting. Whew. Man, is it ever good to be home. Nice, calm, quiet home.

Hooray! Our bigolaro arrived today! I just have to take a file to the handle; there’s a burr or two preventing it from fitting properly. And then I’ll have to drill some holes in our kitchen table so I can bolt it down. How deliciously destructive.

I’ve been making pasta at home for almost fifteen years, off and on, and during all that time I’ve often wanted a good, simple way to make extruded pasta. No stupid fiddly electric machine — just a good solid press. I often thought, jeez, if only those Play-Doh presses were sturdier. Something like that made out of brass, say, would be just perfect.

Well, no surprise, they do exist! And they’re the traditional pasta-making implement of Venice. I read about them in Paul Bertolli’s Cooking By Hand a few months ago. It took some doing, but Josh tracked down a U.S. source.

This thing is super-hefty. It could double as a home defense weapon. It’s a good eight pounds of shiny pasta-making awesomeness, at least. I can justify the ridiculous cost only because it looks like a wonderful piece of kitchen art. This puppy’s going on the wall when it’s not in use.

Finally we can celebrate the feast of Saint Bigolaro properly.

Well, almost. We seem to be missing the correct die. I hope the guy at Pastabiz.com sends it soon.