Category Archives: doing it wrong

The good news is: I figured out how to upload pictures again. The bad news is that it took all the time I had set aside to write some catch-up posts. I have pictures and all kinds of notes sitting here.

Here’s a quickie:

This is one of my rhododendrons. It was looking kinda peaked in the spring but I thought it would bounce back. After those few days over 100 degrees it said good-bye and now looks sad and withered and brown. I am in the process of cutting it down and will plant a native tree in that general area.

A similar thing happened to the one if the front of the house. I asked the landscaper if he could help me get it out and he pushed it back and forth and it broke right off. It took some work but I dug out most of the stump. I hope this one is the same.

ALSO UPDATE: my story, Loss Prevention, is not available yet. It will come out on August 15th and I will remind you then.

The ads that show up on social media make me so mad: especially when they are things that I actually can use. I guess in this case it was an influencer.

She had a little bit different set up but the gist was using this yellow sticky paper to attract little insects in the house.

I have a couple of plants on the window sill that have little flies and I haven’t had any luck getting rid of them.

Then I saw her video and hopped, skipped, and jumped over to Fred Meyer where I found these little yellow sticky strips and you fold them and fasten into a little plastic stick and put in the plant, and look! They really work! This was about a week’s worth. I’m bringing them to the office, too.

Recently I was talking with some people about young people no longer learning cursive writing. I don’t know if it’s everywhere or just some places. I have no strong feelings about it. They don’t need it. Make it optional.

I’m much less concerned about the loss of cursive than I am about the loss of capitalization and punctuation. But then: old lady shakes fist at clouds. The world moves on.

I wanted to look at my writing over the years so I pulled out my notebooks. The above isn’t the complete set.

I’m wondering what to do with all of these. I hate to throw them away. There’s no reason to keep them. No one is going to want to look at them. Just today looking for cursive samples — there are all kinds of notes inserted and little doodles. I’ll have to think about it.

Look at this adorable cursive for my “creative writing” assignment in seventh grade! (1977).

I really struggled to find writing samples that I could take a picture of. I wrote lots and lots and lots of weepy, angsty, damp-eyed teen garbage that even now, I am too embarrassed to show.

This is from a trip in 2002. There is a lot of 90s writing in the notebooks but see above. I had a lot of feelings that I never got tired writing about.

This is from the Hawaii trip we took at the end of last year. I don’t really write cursive anymore. It’s more of a hybrid of cursive and printing but more heavily on the printing. Every once in a while I try to slow down and write true cursive. It doesn’t come naturally at all.

It’s taken me a few weekends but yesterday I finally finished getting the garden in. Today I am sore and creaky all over.

I had previously planted peas and a few greens.

Yesterday I put in two more trellis things for green beans and bush beans. I also spread seeds for greens, carrots, beets and probably a couple of other things. This is the part of garden planting that embraces chaos. I throw out a bunch of seeds and see what happens.

The stuff already growing is potatoes from all the little shriveled potatoes that end up in the drawer. And also maybe some daikon radishes? There were also already a few pumpkins coming in. I tried to let them live but I was also pretty vigorously raking dirt around.

This is the blueberry with the most flowers. The blueberries are kinda small on this one. All the older blueberries have lots of flowers so perhaps this will be a big blueberry year.

The raspberry patch desperately needs TLC but my decrepit joints need a break today.