pameladean

If I had felt able to go to Philadelphia this spring, I'd have already been to the Flower show. However, if you are there anyway or it's handy to you, do contemplate this amazing production:

http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/589704.html?nc=43

Twelfth Night is among the most malleable of Shakespeare's plays in terms of setting, and while I'd back away slowly from steampunk renderings of some of them, I think this one will work gorgeously.

I am not participating in any panels at Minicon this year, which is a mercy, because whenever I do, they are scheduled against

mrissa's reading and I miss the reading. I am also doing a reading myself, fortunately not scheduled against hers. It's at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. I haven't actually figured out what to read yet. I suppose it will be something from the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking novel. I've already read most of the non-spoilerish pieces from it, but I can probably either read a piece that's been cut, or read some new material that hasn't been cut YET. That should give things an air!

Despite the unseasonably warm temperatures, plants are behaving cautiously. I surmise that they do so because it's so dry. The Minnesota River may be brimming over to the point where it looks as if a not unreasonable amount of additional water would allow it to swallow the interstate, but nothing has fallen from the sky for much too long, and we are three inches under our proper yearly precipitation.

Even so, I have purple, gold, and pale-yellow crocuses. The rabbit population must have crashed, but not before they completely did in my longest-lived tulips, the red ones on the south side of the house that always bloomed weeks before any others. I will have to get some more. There are tiny green leaf-buds on the mock orange in front, and winter aconite is coming up, though it doesn't show any disposition to actually bloom yet. The scilla appeared suddenly, as it is wont to do, and its buds are showing blue already. In sunny spots in other people's yard, it's blooming already. The south-facing peony has sent up red shoots, and so, alas, has the Japanese knotweed. I wonder if we'll manage to eat the knotweed shoots this year. Not that this would discourage the plants in the slightest.

Eric and I have had a couple of useful working sessions where he ruthlessly dug up unwanted saplings while I raked the lawn, raked a winter's and more worth of sunflower-seed hulls into piles, and removed a startling array of gardening implements from the raised beds: tattered Walls o' Water, various plant supports, little trays of gravel, and ancient decaying plastic bags whose leaves went to compost long ago. All this wreckage can be laid at the feet of the Amazing Etc. Novel. This year, however, there will be a garden. I just have to dig out the volunteer phlox and dame's rocket and put it somewhere else.

All right, a fourth thing. I have quit sulking and resumed work on the novel. Chapter 13 is a finicky annoying patchwork job, assimilating parts of three original chapters widely separated in the original timeline of the book, so that maintaining continuity is a minor nightmare. I hope to have it done by Minicon, and I think, if I'm lucky, I should then be able to slay a number of chapters wholesale. The book will still be too long, but I'll worry about that later.

I hope you are enjoying your spring or fall, whichever it is for you at the moment.

Pamela