Warm Sunday

 

It’s been another beautiful spring day . . . we’ve had an actual SPRING WEEKEND, what’s gone wrong?*  The gods of anarchy must be off playing golf on Betelgeuse or something.  I hurtled hellhounds over to Old Eden and there were lots of dazed, blinking people on the footpaths wondering what had hit them and like feeling the air for, I don’t know, incipient sleet or something.  Nobody except official card-carrying Ramblers** actually carry maps any more—the dazed and blinking are all carrying their smartphones.  Some things don’t change however:  I was asked for directions three times*** by people staring bewilderedly at their smartphones, and my directions in each case began with some version of ‘first you turn around’.

* * *

* Alicia

My greenhouse is also full of small green things yearning to be outside in the ground. I keep telling them to wait a bit yet or they’ll get a nasty chill and then it would be tears before bedtime!

Also?  Also?  My greenhouse is full of buckets of sand and teetering pre-avalanches of all the stuff that used to be on shelves on the other wall which are not only a cataclysm waiting to happen in their own right but I can’t find anything that I know used to be there and I can’t REACH anything on the shelves behind which (theoretically) should be still more or less as they were before the Wall Trauma began.  Not to mention the risk to life and unbroken limbs that negotiating passing through the greenhouse is at present.  And furthermore I haven’t heard from Atlas.  If he doesn’t come tomorrow and put my shelves back up I may move to an eighth-floor flat.^

But because I am smarting from the jolly description of your splendid greenhouse with its rows and rows of nurtured and pampered seedlings I will just mention in passing that I’ve been tying up the Three Evil Sisters and a short person could probably now walk down that path unmolested.^^  I do not lose gracefully.  It behoves everyone to remember this.

^ And teach the hellcritters to use litter boxes.

Gwyn_sully

Argh, you are making me want to garden. Stop making me want to garden! My poor apartment has nowhere for plants to go!

Windowsills.  Window boxes.  You’re getting no sympathy from me.  There’s a gizmo out there I almost bought a couple of years ago that was called something like Indoor Garden and it was a big tray thing with a grow-light built in over it so the whole deal was free-standing and you could put it anywhere you could plug it in.  They were advertising it for short veg—lettuce and herbs, say—you could probably grow some prone tomatoes.  Or you could just buy a grow-light and hang it over your kitchen/dining table.+  This option is no longer available to me because I have a hellterror (and only one table).++

Right outside my door gets pretty much no sunlight,

Begonias.  Fuchsias.  Camellias.  Foxgloves.  Ferns.  Hostas.  Heucheras.  I could go on a long time, you know.

and all the usable garden space has been claimed by tenants who have been there longer than I. All I have managed is to wodge in a few pots for tomatoes in the front lawn, and I know one of my neighbors at least is quite resentful of them.

Offer him/her a tomato?

+ There may be fancy (read:  expensive) grow-lights out there but the ones in my price range have to hang close to what they’re shining on.  Hence a table.  This also prevents you from walking on your seedlings and constantly clanging into the wretched grow-light.  The winter I had mine in the sitting-room at the cottage I had bruises.  Okay, more bruises than usual.

++ Although I have moved the hellterror crate off the table# onto the floor . . . neither she nor I is totally happy with the new arrangement.  Her view isn’t nearly as good down there, and it’s a small dark kitchen anyway—and she is still Mayhem on four little furry feet so she has to spend any time I can’t keep an eye on her in her crate.  When the Winter Table comes down## I’m going to try shoving the hellhounds’ crate around a little and see if there is any alternative.  I have already blocked off two cupboards in my small kitchen by the fact of having the first frelling critter crate.  Siiiiiiigh.

Also . . . when I had her on the table, she used to BURST out the door and fly into my arms, oof.  And . . . she misses being carried.  Especially in the mornings when we haven’t SEEN EACH OTHER FOR AT LEAST SIX HOURS.  She’d launch herself out of the floor-level crate and immediately start scrabbling up my leg and crying.  So now I get down on the floor when I open the crate in the morning, she bounds gladly into my arms . . . AND THEN I HAVE TO STAND UP CARRYING A FRELLING HEAVY HELLTERROR.  She’s very happy.  She hooks her front paws over my forearms, licks my face, and beats my ribs with her tail.  It’s interesting about tails.  The hellhounds’ tails are long and whippy and they sting if they whack you.  The hellterror’s tail is short and muscular and it’s like being thumped with a truncheon.

But you only have critters at all if you’re demented, so superfluous carriage of wriggly twenty-eight pound parcels is all in the day’s adventures.###

# I didn’t do it sooner because I WAS WAITING FOR SPRING.  She’s only a puppy, she’s not large, there’s only one of her and there are DRAFTS down there.

## Which is apparently not going to be any time soon.  I had everything and its best friend indoors again last night . . . and I believe we are going to repeat this delightful cotillion tonight.  ARRRRRRGH.  When my [tender] dahlia cuttings arrive I am so dead. ~

~ I always order way too many dahlia cuttings.  Even years I’m being pretty good about plant orders . . . I order too many dahlia cuttings.

### Feh etc.

^^ Alicia is not short.  But she’s shorter than I am.

** http://www.ramblers.org.uk/

Yes, I am, because they lobby for stuff like keeping footpaths open, but I’ve never been on a group walk.  I’m thinking about it now however because I think the hellterror would enjoy it, as the hellhounds would not.

*** Person walking dogs is usually a good bet for local pedestrian directions, by the time I open my mouth and my American accent falls out it’s too late, and before they start edging away I’m usually already giving them quite decent (local pedestrian) directions.  It’s when they say things like ‘London’ or ‘the Taj Mahal’ that I have to stop and think about it first.