mariness

More chatter about The Borrowers over at Tor.com.

Meanwhile, the last of the roofing ladders was removed about an hour ago, along with most of the roofing gunk. Alas, some of the nice ornamental plants were crushed, although the weeds were completely spared. This seems unkind. I know we were getting rid of the old roof and it had no reason to like us, but a nice bit of weeding on the way out would have been awesome.

Fortunately it's both seriously hot and raining cats and dogs (that is, the neighbor's dogs are barking about it and the neighborhood stray cat has decided that my lawn chair provides an excellent umbrella), so I suspect most of the plants will be bouncing back quite soon. The grass is certainly spouting.

Years back, one of my grandmothers lived next to two women who kept, among other things, bonsai. And rocks (lots of rocks) and sea shells. I loved the rocks, but the bonsai fascinated me: trees turned into fairy gardens. I want one, I thought.

Years later, I (somewhat reluctantly) shelled out the money for a little one, and promptly killed it.

"Did you keep it inside?" asked a bonsai expert later.

I'd bought it from inside. "Er, yes."

"Well, that did it."

Which was a friendly if probably inaccurate way of deflecting blame.

Anyway, this weekend my brother and I briefly popped into the Winter Garden Rose and Bloom Festival, which had a lot of roses, kettle corn, clowns, little trains, jewelry, pumpkin bread, and yes, other plants. He wanted another paw-paw plant and some other Florida native plants.

Me...

Well, see, some of the booths had bonsai.

I was only planning to get one.

We ended up with two -- a little pine tree one (my choice) and a little ficus tree one (his choice.) They aren't dead yet. Unfortunately, although the ficus doesn't know this yet, it is eventually going to be put into a pot that I am theoretically making in my ceramics class. I say theoretically because as it turns out I am very very bad at ceramics, partly because the class is really exhausting, and after an hour I'm kinda incapable of doing anything in it, partly because I keep forgetting various Important Steps, and mostly because I have no visual imagination. This is what usually happens:

Instructor: What is the clay saying to you?

Me, sadly: Give me to someone that can understand me!

Instructor: No, no. I mean -- look at the shape. What shape does it suggest to you?

Me, looking: Clay.

Or this:

Instructor: Now, if you want, you can add a little bird to this.

Me, excited: Bird? (Several happy minutes with clay, turning to several unhappy minutes when my clay fails to do what the instructor's clay just did.)

Instructor, later: Ah, what a nice abstract look! Well done! Gives a sense of a fish.

Me: Zzzzzz.

The instructor's encouraging hope that even I could use the easy to use bonsai molds turned out to be slightly overoptimistic. I suspect we shall actually be investing in a bonsai pot.

But I digress. Along with the bonsai my brother also picked up some paw-paw plants, I think because he likes to say the word "paw-paw," and a large blueberry bush that already had ripening blueberries on it.

Thus this post, since today I was able to head out and pick an entire pint of blueberries from the backyard. This may never happen again, since chances are good that we will a) kill the bush or b) only manage to get one of the two bushes to flower, thus not allowing whichever one that flowers to pollinate and get little berries, but I thought it should be recorded.

And then I stopped to look at the little bonsai. The one I picked -- the one that's a little pine tree, bent over, a little tiny bit of beauty, holding magic in every leaf.

Hopefully I won't kill it. I have left it outside.

So earlier today I ended up with very heavy pawpaw on my lap.

Pawpaw is the sole food of the zebra swallowtail butterfly, a butterfly who demonstrates the importance of eating a varied diet, because if, like the zebra swallowtail butterfly, you don't, you will find your entire existence threatened by people who don't much care for pawpaws on the basis that they are not, if we are to be wholly truthful, the most beautiful plants in Florida. They do, however, grow in shade and occasionally have fruit, so between that and the butterfly food part, we decided to get two of them at the Spring into the Garden event this morning. Which is about when we discovered another minor problem with the pawpaw tree (or, in this particular case, very scrawny bush): they are HEAVY.

More specifically, the stuff that they are packed in weighs a ton and leaks all over your thankfully very cheap pants. This is because to protect the roots the new little pawpaw plants have to be very tightly packed in wet heavy sand. I may not have mentioned the heaviness. My brother couldn't carry one and push me, so, into my lap they went.

If they die, I am SO TAKING THIS personally.

We also picked up another rose bush – this one purple, and before certain people object, purple is a very cheerful color. I admit it won't precisely match with the deep red, pink, peach and yellow roses out there (assuming the yellow roses agree that life isn't a bad thing, after all, something they seem to be ambivalent about right now). And some mint, on the basis that mint is easy to grow and even I can't kill it (we will have peppermint, spearmint and catmint eventually).

The only slight annoyance was the honey. A certain evil person named tithenai (who not incidentally has a beautiful book out called The Honey Month which all of you should be buying and reading right now with the warning that reading will leave you with a decided craving for honey and poetry. I'm not saying this is a bad thing) has forced me – forced me, I tell you – to explore more and different types of honey. Most of the time, this is from a local honey maker, Winter Park Honey, who were also around today, but this time I decided to try a different person, who was selling something called Star Thistle honey in a little teddy bear bottle. How could I resist?

"Do you want a taste? Do you want a taste?" he kept asking.

I didn't want a taste, as I told him; I just wanted the honey. The star thistle and the tupelo. He kept asking me to taste; I kept asking for the honey.

Alas, once I was home, I realized that he had given me the star thistle and the key lime. I'm not exactly against key lime, but I'm not fond of key lime honey. Which means I will want to get rid of it, quickly. Which probably means cooking with it, tomorrow. Life sometimes has its hard moments, doesn't it?

So, for my birthday, tgregoryt got me something absolutely awesome: a good sized patio garden stand, where, at least in theory, you can grow hanging tomato vines bursting with tomato flavor, and then in the top section grow flowers, if you are the nice picture, herbs, if you're me, and exotic vegetables if you're him. ("Uh. Do we even like those?" I asked, looking at the seeds. "We'll find out.")

Naturally, for awhile, the patio garden stood in solitary splendor in the living room, an object of interest to two furry creatures who swiftly realized that the columns and plastic poles of the patio garden provided marvelous places to spring upon other furry creatures in an unexpected fashion. It worked great, despite an extreme lack of plants.

A few weeks ago tgregoryt moved the patio garden out to the balcony, where the furry creatures happily found that the black plastic base warmed up beautifully in the sun and was a splendid place to sleep on. It still worked great, despite an extreme lack of plants, but we decided to push our luck, and put four little pots with tomato seeds on the top. (By "we" I mean "him.") I put water on the little seeds and sang tomato songs at them* and little sprouts leapt up into the happy sunshine, which we took as a sign to put the patio garden to full use. Which equally naturally is where things went wrong.

This Sunday, he transferred the tomato plants to their new hanging position and put soil on top and planted little seeds on the top. The tomato plants looked exactly like the picture, except, well, smaller. The tomato plants smiled. The furry creatures looked up and meowed. The sun shone. Night came. Morning came. Coffee came. The cats arranged themselves into careful nap positions.

Metallica's "Whiskey in the Jar"** came.

CRASH CRASH CRASH.

As blackgryphon pointed out, clearly, this meant the patio garden, and the tomato plants, were not Metallica fans. Or particularly fond of the pineapple plant, which they crushed on their way down.

As the afternoon progressed, I decided that letting it stay there could not be good for the plants, so I stepped out into the balcony, leaned down, and started to pull it up and nearly blacked out, learning the valuable lesson that leaning down to pick up heavy objects is no longer an activity I can engage in. A few seconds later I felt the firm claws of the Grey One keeping me down. So I decided to let tgregoryt handle this. Which he did (and despite my resulting major headache, I was somewhat cheered to realize that it was, indeed, heavy for him as well, if not dizzying), so we have hopes of tomatoes again. As long as I'm careful not to play Metallica around them.

* I don't actually know any tomato songs. I did sing English madrigals at them.
** I'm not a Metallica person, but that is one awesome cover of that song.