Digging and Planting
3:25 p.m. - 2007-04-18


Aside from knitting a lot, I am mostly working in the garden. Over the winter, weeds spring up everywhere, which is only natural since winter is the only time it rains here. Weeds come up especially between the bricks on our patio areas. We have to pull all these weeds out by hand. In between weed pulling, I have decided to try my hand at garden digging, which I do a little of every day for my exercise. So far, I have dug up one 4 x 8 ft bed, the side strip by the bricks where I plant flowers, and 'the back forty' as he calls the sunny patch behind the orange tree. I have started lots of seeds and have planted out sugar snap peas, lima beans, and green beans. I tend to look a bit freaky out in the garden. I wear pants with my socks pulled up over the cuffs, green garden clogs, a long-sleeved shirt, a face mask for allergies, and a big hat with a net over it. As you can imagine, I am definitely not going to get bit or sunburned.

Tax season is now over, and he is glad. It was not as bad as the year a fellow worker dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving everyone else to work his cases, but it was still a slog. Now he is going to take a few days off to recuperate and dig up weeds.

Jellie got back OK from her junior high trip to Washington DC and New York. They did not have this trip when my kids were in junior high, and a good thing too, since I would have felt bad for them, but I would have said "no". I have been a chaperon on some school trips and don't have a very high opinion of the quality of care that I witnessed. In fact, on one grade school trip, they forgot a kid at the Oakland Zoo and didn't notice until they came back (I was not on that trip but overheard the teachers react with panic while unloading the bus). This sort of thing does not inspire confidence. So no way would I let my kids fly off across the country without me, but moot point, we couldn't have afforded it anyway.

A couple of library book sales are coming up. At the last sale, I got a really good Japanese book, which has lessons written in Japanese for a change, and I am plodding along through lesson one at the moment. I had forgotten (sort of) most of the kana, so am doing a brush-up on the hiragana and katakana. Hopefully, they will slip a little kanji in at a time so as not to tax my brain too much.

I am taking a break at the moment from sewing together the purple sweater and winding yarn for the green sweater. It looks so far as if the raglan design will be successful, but I won't really know until Melissa tries it on.

One of the best things about spring is the scent of the lilacs and freesias, and the heady fragrance of the orange blossoms. I see that the old roses are about to bloom by the driveway, and the wild sweet peas are starting to spread.