Still kind of fascinated with this begonia on my windowsill. It’s beautiful, but somewhat meaty and terrifying as well.

See full size at Flickr, if you’ve an interest.

The Rex Begonia on the windowsill

brought to you by the Garden.

Garden is currently looking like a bomb hit it, but it’s too damn hot and way too buggy to be out working in it.

God, that’s embarasassing, weeds-a-plenty here. (Weeds don’t preclude chihuahua enjoyment, luckily) I planned to get up mega-early this morning to clean things up, but a night of drinking in combo with some prescription meds meant that I was unfit for duty at 6 a.m. or even 8 a.m. and then it was too hot.

Anyway:

The hibiscus started blooming this week and is gorgeous as last year.

And this sunflower was supposed to be pink, but I just don’t see it.

Have to do laundry out the fuck, cut the grass and repair/repaint a stair rail thingee today. Not really in the mood for all of it, but when it’s done I will feel like I haven’t wasted my WHOLE 4-day weekend hanging out with asstards and fuckwits. Also I think I repaired my leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom yesterday, and if so… hooray for me, I have been meaning to do that for a year.

My friend Dave sent me a link to the bare-bones version of the audio cables I need to rip my vinyl, which ended up being $21.90 on ebay, with shipping, so that’s MUCH more my speed. OK, so sometimes it DOES (literally) pay to establish and maintain friendships. Fine. :-p

Please to click here for pictures from the garden.

That’s the sexy way to put it. The other way is that while I was gone the garden attempted a coup, a total takeover of jungle-tropic proportions. Actually that’s way better than everything dying to death of heatstroke while I was gone, so no big deal. Things have grown (literally) feet while I was away. Take a look the yard both pre and post-weeding:

Isn’t my lily there just rocking socks? You can’t see it from this angle, but I also have a butterfly bush that’s at least 8ft tall.

The convergence of

• An actual sunny day
• the return of my energy (can I get a whoo-hoo?)
• the overwhelming amount of weeds in my yard

led to my determining to do some serious weed-whacking this afternoon. I got home from work, changed into scroungy gardening shorts, liberally sprayed myself down with Botanical OFF! and drug the super-long weatherproof extension cord up from the basement. I plugged in ye olde whacker and got to work. Approximately 3 minutes in I ran out of string. Feck. But I was already committed to the whole project, and I was also covered in OFF! which kind of means I just wasted a whole shower unless I do some serious garden work - so I decided to run to the Home Depot and get some replacement string. There you have it, scroungy shorts, OFF!-stink and all, I made my way there. I found the replacement string, bought it and returned home. No harm no foul, right? Wrong. I go to change the string and see that actually I had plenty of string left on my original spool, it had just come un-strung somehow. Feck.

On the bright side - I now have plenty of replacement string, with the added bonus of taking myself out in public looking like a hot mess, which is always fun.

OK whatever, it’s fecking gorgeous here, nothing can foul my mood. So I get back to whacking. Now, here’s the thing. I planted peony bulbs last April. That’s more than a year ago, for those who can’t calendar. Last year they didn’t do anything, but this year three of them came up. Peonies grow slooooooooowly. Two of them have one stalk of green and the other one has two stalks of green and also developed a bud a few weeks ago.

Every day I would go out and check to see if the bud was blossoming, but nooooo, nothing. Every day I would drive back and forth from work, seeing these giant heavily-laden peony bushes all over the place, and all I have is a couple of sprigs and a bud. Then the day before yesterday - it blossomed. And it’s truly gorgeous, almost worth the wait. So in my usual careful manner I was whacking weeds near the peony stalks and whacked one of them off completely, right to the ground. “Feck!” says I. “Well, at least it wasn’t the one with the flower. I will have to be more careful!” then I turned around and cunningly whacked that one to the ground too.

One time I had my horoscope done and in the midst of a lot of other unflattering accuracies it stated that I had a very “unstable” personal energy. This is an example of that, in my opinion. Me and my unstable personal energy. Puppy-like, but not in a cute way. In the way that always ends up with mud on someone’s pant leg.

Oh well. Since my hormones have re-balanced I found it funny and ridiculous rather than either tragic or infuriating. Hopefully they will grow back, sloooooowly or not. And now I get to have the pretty flower inside in a vase - see how delightful to gaze upon it is? (It’s the big fluffy pink one, not the knobbly green thing. That’s an avocado.)

Now I go to shower off all of this OFF!

And it’s the desperation to hold on to
Something that can’t be held on to
So, don’t waste your time filling up my words
Don’t tell me why, assume the worst.

I don’t need to need you
Tell me what to do
Tell me what to say

Don’t you wanna help me?
Tell me what to do
Help me find a way

Hopefully, you make no mistake
If you learn from what you‘ve got to take
Good or bad, it‘s all gonna add up in the end but,
You can never win.

Don‘t thank me,
Don‘t tell me how,
Don‘t break me down,
Don‘t help me make it,

I don‘t need to need you
Tell me what to do
Tell me what to say

- Fischerspooner, Never Win

I think one of the reasons that I love my garden so much is that I can grow things that look as magical as the things I dreamed of when I was a child. Like truffula trees from The Lorax, for example. Gardening is a chance for me to build my own fairytale kingdom.

The color of these daisies is so vibrant that I think it’s messing up the calibration of my camera.

I TOLD you it was a good year for roses (so far). These are Moondance, English Mary, Angel Face and Abraham Darby varieties. All from my garden. Am I not the luckiest?

Red Daisies
Originally uploaded by superBadGirl



Meadow Sage
Originally uploaded by superBadGirl


Cinderella Sweetheart Ivy
Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

Lots of work in the garden yesterday for seemingly small result. The weeds are/were insane but I managed to get quite a few pulled.

The sunshine (which finally arrived) means that some things are trying to bloom. Like this red daisy - the picture came straight from the camera like this and I loved it.

The meadow sage is doing beautifully in my garden and makes a perfect contrast with the pink of the salvia in front and the Mary rose behind, I am in awe of them.

And finally, there was no way I could resist this Cinderella coach for my sweetheart ivy to twine around. I try to stay away from too many garden tchotkes, but some you just have to have.

Easy come and easy go
Has never been the case
Dreams of you are hard to erase
Call me crazy, call me mad
Call me what you will
But I’m sane enough to know that I love you still

They say that life goes on,
But I’ve been dead since you’ve been gone
I think they were wrong
So who’s the fool?

I am ever after you
Always ever after you
Tell me what I have to do
Is there a way to be happy ever after you?

Today was my last physical therapy session. In my evaluation I said that I felt I was about 85% better, and the rest of the improving I have to do I can do with my exercises at home. I can now balance on my bad leg for 30 seconds though! When I started I couldn’t even do one second on that leg. It was really busy at the PT place, my 4:30 slot was a pretty popular one for people getting off from work, I suppose. There really are some characters at that place, for real. Made for excellent people-watching.

Oh, and (accidental I think) weirdness. When my therapist was doing my post-therapy evaluation we were chatting about how busy it is there, and how strange some of the goings-on are. Then he was saying that he thought I would do fine with my at home exercises. “But,” he said “Call me if you have any questions. Even if it’s not about your foot, feel free to go ahead and call me.” Which - I kinda blinked at. Like, what sort of questions? I have a lot about the ways of the world. And why people are the way they are, and why bad things keep happening to me, and all sorts of other kinds of queries, none of which I had thought to address to him. And then it made it kinda seem like he was hitting on me. Which I will presume he was not, but go ahead and totally take because I needed the Friday afternoon ego boost.

Fuck I had a shitbag week at work. It just keeps getting more and more insane there. And I can’t find another job that I want at a place that it wouldn’t kill me to work. I can’t work for a chemical company, or a rifle manufacturer, for god’s sake. Nor do I want to work for a stockbroker or an architecture firm. I guess I just love working in education. It’s just that my kind of position at an educational institution is hard to come by. I have several resumes out, so we will see. For now I am just hanging in there. The good news is that as my hormone levels are (presumably) straightening out, I am much more calm. That’s really good. I like being calm. So it takes more to get me wound up. But by the end of the week I tend to be somewhat wound up. And I wanted to go out tonight and realized that MyTodd™ is in Vegas for a wedding (asshole) and I don’t really like to go out without him, as I have mentioned before. Maybe I will go out tomorrow. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I spend a hefty sum on new plants tonight including an emerald phlox that has foliage to die for. And that cheered me. Also I put my keys in the pocket with the hole in it (note to self: examine why so many of my pockets have holes in them. perhaps some mending is in order?) and then had a frantic “dig through purse 30 times in vain effort to find keys” moment and then found that some kind soul had turned them in. But then I got home and two of these foul little dogs had pooped in my office because I was so late. So all in all it’s a mixed bag kind of evening.

OK /end overshare-ramble-rant.

Ajuga reptans “Chocolate Chip”

Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

bleeding heart

Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

Lily of the valley

Originally uploaded by superBadGirl

I can’t believe the changes in the garden in just the last two weeks. Amazing. I hope it’s never winter again.

In other news, I finally got around to listening to The Weepies new album “Hideaway” and it’s just as amazing as I thought it would be. It’s so good it makes me cry and sneeze at the same time.

Every song, better and better. Just like their previous albums, the marriage of music and lyric is so perfect that it literally hurts my heart.

You can listen to some of it at their site, linked above.

“Orbiting” is my favorite so far. Partial lyric:

Guess I went somewhere to hide
Far behind my eyes
I willed you there to see
But you never came for me

Now I’m out of your range
Now it’s kind of strange
How we change orbit in our lives
You were kind of a moon
outside of my room
I could just feel you nearby

Now I feel you gone
‘Cause I know which side you’re on
And it’s not mine

In other other news, I just had my first pedicure since the infamous bone-breaking stair mishap of 2008. I like pedicures at the same time as they make me really nervous. I am not big on strangers doing personal grooming things to me, so the person has to be really good to make me relax and enjoy it. This person wasn’t like that. She just grinned a lot and was nice to me because she wanted a big tip. Fair enough.

Anyway, my feet feel wonderful and look pretty and tomorrow when I go to physical therapy and the guy “manipulates” my foot at an uncomfortable proximity to his crotch I will at least not be embarrassed of my calluses, I will just be embarrassed that my foot is going to accidentally rub something it doesn’t want to.

Actually since starting PT I have felt so much better, this weekend has been the best yet. I worked for about 3 hours in the garden today and I feel fine. I think it was just finding out what I could safely do, since I was petrified to even look at my foot lest I damage it. This guy has assured me I can’t rebreak my bone that easily and shown me all the things I need to do to loosen the muscles that are all cramped up. He’s also impugned my ability to teeter on one foot with my eyes closed and told me that if I had better balance then I would be less likely to fall in the first place. Again, fair enough. I am supposed to be practicing my balance. Shoot, gotta do that today.

OK that’s all.