Wherein We Define "Busy"

"Busy" is not having time to check your email once a day. "Busy" is realising that your daytimes are full up for the next two weeks (but if someone wants to spend next weekend with me, come to VanDusen's plant sale, it's awesome and I'll be in the rhodo section). "Busy" is thinking about what to post to your livejournal for a week, but not really having time to post any of it.

So, the highlights that I can remember offhand:

o I have the cutest baby rats in the world. They are here, and home, and Lightning keeps getting her feet messed up because Sweetie's become totally territorial and insecure even though the babies are in a different cage. I'm practicing poly skills by spending lots of time with Sweetie, etc. which is helping her some. he has turned into a real sweetheart and will sit in my lap for hours, which makes me happy too. Helen is still Helen.

o I have been taking tons of pictures. In part it's reminding me of things to tell LJ about, in part there are certain types of pictures I think are neat-- rooftop forests downtown, bits and pieces lying around, reflections in surfaces. Also some things are just awesome, like this:( Read more... )

o I love my contact lenses.

o I finally got to spend some time with Graham. Dammit, how can we both be so busy?

o I got a touch of a sunburn.

o The radishes in my community garden, and the peas, are coming up. I need to plant some chard somewhere. I need to prune the comunity garde's raspberries.

o I met the awesomest guy at the nursery by where Tillie and I will live, and we talked about magnolias with Juggler for a long time, and it was friggin' awesome. Did you know they come in yellow? I didn't. That conversatopm was hot. Also spoken of: climate change as related to olive trees being sold in the nursery and vinyards in the Okanagan.

o There will be some Cotton Candy rhododendrons at the Plant Sale. These are scented, and the best thing ever. Two years ago we had some in, but I didn't exercise my employee priviliges and steal them away before anyone else. I regretted it for two years. Now, I have no qualms. Three days of unpaid volunteering and I deserve to be allowed to pay for these, dammit.

o Food, mmmmr.

o Oh Saturday I didn't get out of bed till 3:30 in the afternoon, which was lovely, cause I won't be doing that again for awhile.

o The floofy cherry blossoms are out. I sat and watched a tree spiral petals fifty feet up into the air the other day. It was unbelievable. Pictures 'turned out' but didn't capture the beauty: ( Read more... )

o I am playing with my ratties everyday, so phthbt!

o Juggler is sleeping in the other room, I will go back to bed now for a little bit (at my house, whee)

o I took a series of pictures I've been wanting to take for a long time, I'll get them up soon.

Beth Asked:

"Would you like to settle down someday, with all that entails?"

Interesting question. I'd consider that I *have* settled down. As I said the other day, if I had my 'druthers, I'd not be moderating myself so much and moving so slowly in my life, but I've found that slow-moving, predictable, controlled-change things make for a better community around me, and my community and the people in it (CrazyChris, Juggler, Graham, Trevor, Tillie, Bevan's getting in there) are so absolutely important to me that I'll allow that influence to moderate me. That's settling down. So's coming home every day to snuggle the rats.

Unless this is the typical question about poly-partners, where I'll admit that I don't think sexual exclusivity is 'settled down' for me. You can't imagine how much more flighty I'd be. I do intend to live in a house that has a garden where I don't move a lot.

One More

I saw a movie called 'lucky number Slevin' the other day, which rocked. I love cons.

Long-Planned

One Man's Trash



I work one day a week outdoors at a hotel, doing their plants. I do a lot of deadheading, I control pests, I pinch and shape, I weed, and when it's called for I turf out everything and put in new stuff. In the fall, like everywhere else in the city, we put in pansies, tulips, daffodils, and english daisies.

In the summer, there are fantastic begonias, osteospermum, etc.

When I first started, last summer, I kept looking into the trash can. The begonias were these amazing fruit colours, and there I am, pulling off the bright flowers and throwing them in to make something very like a kaleidoscope: changing every time you look at it, and very very pretty. And of course, I kept wanting to explain this to people: I work with flowers all day, I'd say, or you would not believe how beautiful a pile of flowers with fresh dew is.

Right now it's pansy season, as I said. This is what my trash can looked like last week:
( Read more... )

Then I went upstairs and trimmed the tips off the pansies, to keep them bushy. Now, I want to tell you some facts about pansies. Namely, they're edible, especially teh tender fresh green tips. If you were to start up a really high-end salad greens business, you might put pansy tips and a couple of flowers into your mix. They're good spring greens. So, with that in mind:



I want to take them home and eat them and give them to my friends, but... they're from a hotel. People smoke and throw their cigarette butts on these plants. They puke on them. They likely piss on them. I wear latex gloves to touch the soil. Some days I find underwear in the flower beds. Understand, this is a high class hotel, etc, but this stuff still happens. So... all those calories, in the trash.

Maybe someday they'll get compost.