You're Doing It Wrong

When we bought this house, this circle of weeds and gravel was advertised as RV parking.

I’m pretty sure we couldn’t get away with that today especially since the driveway behind us is private. How would you get the RV in there? I imagine as long as you have a good relationship with your neighbor it’s doable but still.

I have long planned to turn the gravel into an area for planting. About 5 years ago I spent 2 hours sifting and gave up.

But I was inspired this year by an article about this small city property with lots of fruit trees and bushes and I re-applied myself.

That’s as far as I got–that “where the bodies are buried” little area–working really hard over a period of a couple of weeks. I thought it would go faster.

I was tossing the gravel in the front on the parking strip and Bob thought I was so clever moving the gravel. I didn’t know where else to get rid of it.

This used to be a rhodie and a hedge. The rhodie gave up life all of a sudden and I had the hedge pulled out and it’s been empty ever since. This was also a rehab project because the soil was a mass of roots.

But also neglected year after year. I had tomatoes and some volunteer annuals in there. Those little bits of plants are the pulled up tomatoes.

I was attempting to dig up some of the lawn and make the plant bed bigger but it was tough going and I ran out of time due to all the other zillion projects in my life.

Next year!

Check out this guy, stirring up the bucket and looking suspiciously at the camera.

I usually have the camera attached to the Spool of Destiny (spool) but lately I’ve been attaching it to a bucket so I can move it around more easily.

I had *just* scrubbed out the bucket and it’s all dirty again. After a few days of this it starts looking like a scary pond. Maybe this gives them more nutrients.

Life is insanely busy at the moment. I bet if we went back and pulled up a mid-October post every year going back we’d find the same thing.

I’m off to Orleans tomorrow for the week. Updates, perhaps when I return.

Bob and I went to Atlanta for a long weekend that turned out to be super fun and a great way to end the summer.

But it was a long day of travel and when we got home we were tired and trying to organize laundry and prioritize chores and responsibilities. I had to get prepared to go back to the office.

I found some rice in the fridge that had been there awhile and I tossed down the garbage disposal.

The garbage disposal decided that this was the day to die which we did not discover until we were finished with dinner and rushing to get things cleaned up so we could stagger off to bed. The main sink backed up, the auxiliary side backed up and for whatever reasons the sink in the laundry room is part of this series of tubes and it got backed up with gross stuff, too,.

If you have ever tried to problem solve with your partner when you are both tired and frustrated you can probably imagine how that all went. Plus, who doesn’t try to solve a problem using a bad idea? We won’t go into all that.

Anyway, we handled as best we could by ourselves before giving up and not the next day but the day after a plumbing team arrived to save the day.

Our disposal was from 2006 so no big surprise that had to be replaced. But the plumbing experts thought that the way our sink was set up underneath was problematic so they rearranged things so that now the LEFT is the disposal side and the right is rinse sink.

We have lived in this house over 20 years. The change makes better sense for our work flow and we trust the plumbers, but YIKES, it is hard to get used to. I am moving things back and forth over and over every time I’m in the kitchen. But it drains like a champ again.

I’ve never grown squash before mostly because I am afraid of harvesting 10 zucchini a day and having no place to put them and running out of ideas for what to do with them so then feeling guilty about composting or pretending I don’t see them and leaving them on the plant to turn into baseball bats.

A couple of weeks ago I was poking around my garden and I saw something that looked like a patty pan squash. I did not plant a patty pan squash and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. We don’t eat a lot of patty pan squash either.

But my friend Christopher gave me some seeds this season so went and checked and one of them was white scallop squash which for some reason when he gave them to me, I pictured as a sort of pale pumpkin.

Aha! White scallop squash. And it’s not giving me 10 a day. It only gave us 2 so far and there are 2 more out there. And they were DELICIOUS. I wish there were more.

Look at these cute little guys, playing.

I have another more recent clip with 5 (5!) raccoons around the deck so the water bucket and camera have been moved out by the shed.

We celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary last week. We went to Tanaka — delicious Japanese comfort food. When I first saw the menu and items called “sandos” I rolled my eyes. HAHA. Joke’s on me. I have been there at least 4 times in the last month. Recommend!

Then we went to see Goose a hippie jam band kind of thing downtown.

As we left the restaurant there was a wave of tie-dyed people walking towards the show.

When we arrived there was a fairly long line to get in. Someone came over and told us there was another entrance on the other side with no line. My husband is a pokey walker and I was amazed how quickly he could move when it meant getting into our show faster.

“Now you can walk fast?” I called after him.

It was fun music and fun to see so many people downtown so happy to be out. There was a lady in a dress that had porcupines and amanita mushrooms on it. Whenever I’m shopping online I always look at the outdoor summer sporty dresses: Eddie Bauer, Athleta, Columbia, Prana — I saw every dress I’ve ever looked at on someone at that show.

My only complaint was that it was a little too crowded. I had a place to sit on the brick steps but my aged bum protested pretty quick. I wouldn’t have minded dancing but the crowd was really tight and it was hot and I wasn’t up for fighting my way into that. We left early. (But also I had worked all day.)

Someone has been breaking into my house and putting so, so, so many clips of raccoons on my computer. Also downloading too many photos and many of the same ones over and over as if they don’t understand how an iPhone works.

Last weekend the plan was to go to the Native American Art Market in Santa Fe, NM with my cousins for a girls weekend. My niece was a model in a fashion show and it was going to be a weekend of fun and getting away.

BUT, life intervened and there were some elders with health situations and everyone cancelled at the last minute and went to Orleans instead.

I am oversimplifying but this isn’t the place for the whole story.

This is the Klamath River at Tashawnik. There was a big fire upriver called the McKinney Fire that killed three people and vaporized a huge swathe of gorgeous scenery not to mention many homes. This is different than the Slater Fire from the 2020 fire season that killed two people and also vaporized a huge swathe of different gorgeous scenery and many homes in Karuk territory. I didn’t get to see the damage from that until June of this year.

I don’t know how to articulate what it’s like to see the damage from wildfires like that other than to say it’s hard not to cry and it’s really awful.

Back to the photo above, there was a huge rain storm and debris went into the river — I think below Happy Camp. The river looks like chocolate milk. Also a bunch of fish died.

Getting back to the Orleans trip, we had time with Mom and time with the health-impaired elders who are hanging in there like champs.

This is an elk track from Tashanik — a big one.

I got the news that the trip was cancelled while I was en route to the airport so I arrived in Orleans with my Santa Fe ‘let’s go out on the town clothes.’ I wore the same shorts (borrowed from my sister) for most of the trip. It was much hotter in Orleans than forecast for NM.

We worked around the place. Here is a giant bear pile kindly left right under Mom’s window, in the garden and on the hose to make sure we didn’t miss it. We ate lots of zucchini and cucumbers. Went on some nice walks. I read a lot. We managed to wring a decent weekend out of some not great circumstances.