pameladean

I'll put the photos behind a cut this time. I am out of practice.

The heaps of snow and ice have dwindled in a fast-forward blur. I didn't get outside in the daylight yesterday or the day before. Today the temperature reached 87 degrees, which I was not ready for and did not appreciate. Neither, it turns out, did the snowdrops. They are going to drop their petals and go to seed much sooner than in a chillier season.

The scilla is pretty happy about the situation, however.

There are a lot more leaves on the ground than I remember seeing last fall. I don't rake or mow the leaves any more in order to give beneficial pollinators a winter shelter. I can get rid of the leaves when the nighttime temperature is reliably above fifty. It will be tonight, but not reliably over enough of the next days.

( A couple of cellphone photos below )

I have some similar photos of scilla in a similar phase from last year, but last spring was so cold that those photos are from June 4. This does not exactly make my head lie easy, even though it does not wear a crown. But I cannot help welcoming the returning life.

Pamela

The pandemic isn't over, but the one-year mark came in with a lot of changes. Now that the first year is done, I regret not keeping a pandemic diary, as so many people did. But I have to say, to a far greater extent than I anticipated, the entire situation did a very bad number on my brain.

Once I was fully vaccinated I went in for lab work for the first time since June of 202, when my doctor begged me to do so before the anticipated surge in cases after the protests of the police murder of George Floyd. There was no surge, mercifully, which has not stopped right-wing bots and trolls from whining in perpetuity about how nobody complains about protests even though they obviously spread the virus.

My doctor had had me send her blood pressure and blood sugar numbers taken at home for a week or so in February, and then told me she would like to increase my metformin dosage. I agreed. This has been more annoying than I anticipated. I need to take metformin with food lest it wreak havoc on my digestion. The extra 500 mg is supposed to be taken with breakfast, while I retain the practice of taking 1000 mg with dinner. Medical directions of this sort always think people eat breakfast at 8 a.m. and dinner at 6 p.m., and they think bedtime is eleven p.m. at the latest. My schedule is nothing like that, and in particular meals tend to be crammed into a smaller percentage of the day than in the idyllic regular dreams of the people who write directions for the ingestion of medications.

In addition to eating it late, I also don't eat very much breakfast, since I have never since puberty been hungry until several hours after I get up. Now I'm eating twice as much as I want in the morning, which isn't much fun and also involves preparing twice as much. I used to eat a cup of soy yogurt, which was sufficient to cushion the effect of four blood pressure medications, an acid-reflux medication, and a different diabetes medication. Now I have to, horrors, make toast or oatmeal or something. In the morning. Not only am I not hungry when I wake up, my brain also, even when it was working well, did not really come online for an hour or two either. So I'm eating a larger breakfast than I want earlier than I want, which ends up pushing lunch further out. I usually have breakfast around 1 p.m. if I'm lucky, and lunch around five or six. Dinner is very late for a number of reasons having nothing to do with metformin, but it is not late enough to put twelve or usually even ten hours between breakfast and itself. So I'm perpetually flailing about the kitchen at 2 a.m. trying to find something substantial enough that I also actually want to eat in order to take the metformin.

Despite all these complaints, the new dosage is working and my A1c is down to 6.0. (This test measures the percentage of red blood cells that have glucose attached to them. A result of 6.0 is "pre-diabetes" in normal people but very good news in a diabetic; it's quite a bit below the point at which nasty complications tend to show up.)

Other lab work was fine too, except that, since she'd increased my metformin, my doctor ordered a vitamin B12 test, and I turned up borderline deficient. A remarkable number of symptoms that I had put down to pandemic stress, and that I have seen listed as symptoms of pandemic stress in any number of articles, turn out to be possible effects of B12 deficiency.

I've been taking B12 supplements for a couple of weeks and they are starting to have an effect on my energy levels and on the sweetness of my temper. We'll see about the higher cognition, I guess. My doctor thinks the deficiency is caused by the metformin, but I think it may have begun earlier than that, since I just generally eat somewhat weirdly.

Eric came over today for a short masked, distanced visit in the back yard. There might be one more of those, and then we can meet as in the before times. My brother will be fully vaccinated as of May 19th, and then anybody in my household who wishes can go see him and my mother and sit indoors unmasked and not have to yell all the time.

Eric had a complicated hierarchy of errands that had already been slightly derailed, if one can derail a hierarchy; so the visit was even shorter than anticipated. I stayed in the yard, hunting down all the peonies, which I'd been meaning to check on for several days. Raphael and I went for a long walk yesterday and started seeing the red alien shoots of emerging peonies everywhere, bringing ours tardily to mind. I am usually peering at their locations as soon as the sow is gone. Mine are in fact all up, even the unfortunate one that is being shaded out and wants moving. I watered them all. There were also a number of mystery plants that I'd been puzzling over for some days. They look a  little but not enough like daylilies, and while daylilies will pop up wherever they can, they don't usually jump long distances; these plants were not that close to any daylilies. One in the front finally offered up a bulb, and I remembered that I'd succumbed to a good deal on mixed giant alliums last fall. So that will be a nice surprise when they bloom. I watered those, too.

We have five flourishing green daffodil plants and one lone, extremely tenacious daffodil flower, which remained unmoved by snow, frost, and comparative drought. I should feed all of them. Most of the rest of the yard is either emerging creeping bellflower (argh), rampant scilla, non-native sedges, a bit of stubborn grass, and volunteer trees, largely box elder, hackberry, mulberry, Siberian (or possibly Chinese) elm, Norway maple, and green ash. There is one lilac bush, a volunteer from seed of the neighbor's ancient, lightning-struck, but still persisting bush. Eric said he was glad we had gotten a scion of that lilac before the neighbors put up a six-foot board fence, and I am of the same mind.

The other thing that Raphael and I saw on our walk was a glorious abundance of species tulips. I ended up ordering three different kinds for next year.

In addition to having energy and regaining such sweetness of temper as I can be said to have possessed, I've begun to be able to work on my Zeno's Novel in a more efficient fashion. I hope I may post here more often, a pandemic aftermath diary, perhaps, though when I think of India, and of all the people I'm worried about because they haven't been able to be vaccinated yet, I don't think we are in any aftermath just yet.

I've read every post in my circle all this time and have really appreciated every one of them, and the persistence of everyone's existence.

Pamela

Edited to correct previously-invisible typos.

Yesterday and today I made myself go out for a walk. Yesterday, though sunnier, was much brisker than today, with a searching breeze that made me glad I'd put a fleece jacket over my hoodie, though I was too warm by the time I got within a few blocks of home.

People are being very good, very locally, about distancing. I've seen a slight increase in the number of people wearing masks. I don't have one yet and simply stay well away from everybody.

The scilla is in full bloom, both in our yard and in the neighborhood generally. I used to covet those sheets of pure blue in other people's yards, and now I have one. It began with about three volunteers from the yard next door and a bag of 25 bulbs that I planted mostly in the shadiest part of the back yard, leaving a handful to carefully put in a chicken-wire cage with a handful of winter aconite and plant in the front instead. Both front and back yards are now dotted with individual plants pushing their territory outwards. All the purple crocuses are up and blooming. The yellow and white ones haven't put in an appearance yet.

Unlike most of my neighbors, I have not raked any leaves out of the lawn or flowerbeds. The Xerces Society, champion of pollinators, asks that one wait until the soil temperature is reliably fifty degrees at all times before raking up the shelter of many overwintering beneficial pollinators. But Minnesotans are out there way too early, raking away, as if bare ground were lovelier than a patchwork of leaves, as if a brown lawn were nicer than that patchwork as well. It looks tidy, I guess, but lovely it is not.

I do admit to having lifted by hand about six maple leaves that were preventing the opening of crocus buds, but that is all.

Quite aside from the question of pollinators, I am now vindicated because there will be a winter storm tomorrow, followed by several quite cold days and nights below freezing.

Yesterday had bright sun and cloud shadows dappling the new daffodils along my route and picking out the red shoots of peony and hosta. Today there was a kind of ghost sun, showing me a faint outline of my shadow, sometimes a human figure, sometimes a walking tree or pillar, sometimes vanished.

I'm having trouble reading fiction, even books I've read before. Basic hygiene, cooking dinner, and walking have been my accomplishments, along with a call to the Member Services Line of my health insurance company to inquire why my medication list had disappeared from their new website. (It hadn't, they'd just put it under a weird tab. Next time I'll just go through all tabs no matter how apparently irrelevant.)

We are all well here so far. I will get to wave to my local brother from a safe distance on Monday when he comes to collect groceries from our porch -- there were no delivery dates available in the suburb he and my mom live in, but Minneapolis still had a few. It has none now, though pickup dates are still copious.
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Saffron is having some issues with her food. She is prone to gum inflammation. For some time this has been kept in check by a prescription food called TD, which comes in large unwieldy chunks and must be crunched up rather than just bolted by the feline consumer. But she stalled out on eating a portion a few days ago and then refused to even try the next one. There's nothing wrong with her appetite; she agitated ceaselessly for actual food until I opened a can of wet food, which she ate with abandon. We tried her on the TD again after, we hoped, giving any minor soreness of jaw a chance to heal, and she did eat most of a serving but left several pieces, and left more the next time. So we are trying the soft food again, and hoping we aren't actually training her or allowing her to train us to just give her the damn wet food already.

After the first few indignities at the veterinarian's office, she has refused to let the vet look insider her mouth at all; and he said that if we ever did need to see what was going on in there, she'd have to be sedated. I hope it doesn't come to that.

How are you all?

Pamela

I just took down the 2015 Minnesota Weatherguide Calendar (it does not do to be hasty about these things), the December photograph in which was a lovely one of a snow- and icicle-encrusted evergreen branch in the foreground, with a wave caught breaking in white spray behind it, and snow- and evergreen-encrusted islands on the horizon, somewhere on Lake Superior. The January photo for the 2016 calendar is also of Lake Superior, at Gooseberry Falls State Park, a rocky beach with lumps of ice perched atop the rocks, each one perfectly sized for its perch, as if a wave had come in and instantly frozen. In the background are the lake, looking very cold, and a low but brilliant sun. I read the Phenology section with great pleasure, because it almost always tells you to listen for the "fee-bee" call of chickadees establishing their territories, and the drumming of downy woodpeckers. And even in the middle of the city, I have heard both of these things already, birds not being great devotees of the Gregorian calendar.

Today a lot of house sparrows are yelling their heads off in the neighbors' pea-bush hedge, and occasionally a crow makes a pronouncement about some esoteric matter.

I'm hoping to post more, however mundane the content of the posts is. Here is a bit that I wrote but never posted just before Christmas.

( Read more... )

"Today I made vegan cream of mushroom soup, which is quite delicious, if extremely rich; but I didn't make it to be eaten as soup, but rather to be used in a casserole the recipe for which comes from the family of one of my partners. Then I made dinner for Raphael and me (macaroni and goat cheese and steamed broccoli), and now I am roasting some mushrooms, to be followed by green beans and cauliflower. The last-minute roasted vegetables I made for Thanksgiving (turnips, broccoli, and carrots) were so wonderful that I want to have some more at Christmas dinner. Sadly, some people I seem to be related to don't like turnips, so I'm doing these different vegetables. I had more mushrooms than I needed for the soup, and that is how it all arose. I expect these vegetables will still be wonderful, and I also got some turnips to roast later in the week." In the event, the roasted vegetables were very good, and I did roast turnips, carrots, broccoli, and more mushrooms a few days later. Also very good. I was sneaking the leftovers cold out of the fridge as if they were cheesecake.

The day before Christmas was a better day for pie crust than the day before Thanksgiving. All the pies came out fine. David has heroically finished the mince, and both pumpkin pies are still being worked on. I didn't assist the situation much by making two loaves of banana bread and then lugging one all over on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day but never actually getting it out at a party, so now we have to eat all of that too. The horror. It's a good batch. The recipe uses up to six bananas, with enough whole-wheat flour and sugar to hold them together and some rising agents, salt, vanilla, and cinnamon, with optional walnuts. Aside from the quality of the bananas, which is not really under our control, the keys to a good batch of banana bread seem to be increasing the amount of walnuts, toasting them thoroughly, using fresh cinnamon and good vanilla (thanks, carbonel!), and not under-baking the result. It's also useful to gauge the level of moisture in the bananas and lower the number used if they seem too gooshy.

Christmas dinner was small this year, but we all had a good time. lydy was gallivanting about the East Coast and David's sister couldn't make it, so it was just five of us. We had lots of leftovers, which was very satisfying. I tried to recreate my youngest brother's balsamic-mustard-maple-syrup reduction for the salmon, but it came out too mustardy. Still very tasty, just not sublime. And the oyster casserole was a great success with arkuat as a birthday treat. Follow Your Heart vegan cheddar substitute melts like Velveeta and makes a grand cheesy sauce with homemade vegan cream of mushroom soup. I had leftover soup and ended up making more cheesy sauce and putting it over baked potatoes after I'd eaten all the proper leftovers.

This seems to be a very foodish post. I suppose it's the time of year.

David and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary by going to Kyoto All You Can Eat Sushi. My favorite piece was the sweet potato hand roll, but it was all very good. On New Year's Eve Day David had to go deal with a complicated computer project. I made rosemary shortbread that was too dry and crumbly and slightly greasy, and oatmeal shortbread that did not work right at all. The rosemary was demonstrably shortbread, not greasy oatmeal candy like the oatmeal attempt, but it still wasn't right. I think Earth Balance has messed with the formula of their tub margarine so that it doesn't work right for baking, and I will henceforward need to only use the Buttery Sticks for baking. These are sadly no good for just putting on your toast or potato, which is annoying.

On New Year's Eve, David and I went to two parties. I actually hate this, and cherish a useless nostalgia for the comparatively few years when everyone I wanted to see attended the MinnStf party. Even then, when I had first joined MinnStf, there was at least one splinter group that had its own party; I just didn't know those people well and didn't care. The MinnStf party was hosted in a really grand fashion with chicken noodle soup, tacos with a vast array of possible fillings, and, it was rumored, a turkey breast; also huge tubs of hummus, interestingly flavored chips, vegetables (including what looked and tasted like heirloom cherry tomatoes of several varieties), and a plenitude of fruit and candy. The banana bread seemed surplus to requirements, so I didn't get it out. I had several pleasant conversations, and the general conversation upstairs was also nice. I felt guilty leaving, but was very glad, at the second party, to see at least six people I always love to talk to and a number of other congenial sorts, as well as two very self-possessed and fluffy cats. This party was also more than well supplied with edibles, so I didn't bring the banana bread out for it either.

We got home before 2, when I realized that I'd forgotten my knapsack with the lonely loaf of banana bread in it, so we had to drive back to get it, David exhibiting remarkable patience at my fecklessness. I am looking after Lydy's cats while she's gone, so there was half an hour of washing food bowls, parcelling out wet food to the healthy in small doses and to the cat with kidney issues in a larger one, refilling waterers, scooping litter boxes and cleaning up the floor where Naomi, the kidney cat, earnestly pees from inside the box. I don't even, but we love her a lot. Then when I got upstairs, Saffron produced a long fussy lecture about my deficiencies in being gone so much and then clattering around downstairs instead of attending to her. She had been quite adequately looked after by Raphael while I was away, but that was not, I take it, the issue.

She was very snuggly overnight. When I woke up I glanced at the clock and thought, 11:09, that's not bad at all. However, a closer look showed that it was 1:09, so there was some scrambling around. However, David and I had agreed that we would get to the Hair of the Dog party after three but before five, and we did manage that. This is one of my favorite parties, and it was really lovely. All but two pieces of the inadequate rosemary shortbread did get eaten. There were goat butter and good bread and goat and sheep cheeses and fava bean dip and Thai hummus and taramasalata and sesame brussels sprouts and fancy olives and six kinds of herring and celery and grape tomatoes and carrots and cornichons and a very chunky guacamole and a gingerbread trifle, which was not at all Pamela-safe, but Beth offered me a bite and it was stupendous. I had a nice conversation with Katie and Magenta and got to hear lemur anecdotes from Karen, and Josh let us look at the portable museums he'd contributed to the Kickstarter for. They are small blocks of lucite in which are embedded very small bits of museumy objects, like dinosaur skin and bone and a bit of tape from an Apollo mission's music selection. I liked the Japanese star sand the best (it's microfossils), but it was all well worth looking at and pondering. I also got to talk a bit to Laura Jean, which almost never happens, and to Tamsin, though most of my conversation with her had occurred the evening before. The general conversation around the museums also included Eric and David, and Beth and Barb J. and Bruce. It was not actually alliterative, though.

Eric and I had decided to just have our date continuing on from the party, so we went back to my house around ten, and I did a bunch more cat work. Ninja helped us make the bed, as usual, with an interruption from Lady Jane, who keeps trying to play with him but hasn't persuaded him to return the desire yet. We read our books and didn't stay up terribly late. Lady Jane leapt onto the bed for petting several times, but didn't want to stay. We had most of our date on Saturday, ending with brunch at the Himalayan Restaurant, a brief stop at the new coop on 38th Street, and a stop to fill up the tank of Lydy's car, which she had kindly lent Eric and me in her absence.

Then I came home and caught up on LJ and had many thoughts about people's 2015 roundup posts, about whether I am remotely a working writer any more and other somber musings. It's easy enough to fix this. Well, no, it's not easy at all. But it's very simple.

Saffron had more to say to me about my various absences, but this week will be normal, so perhaps I won't be scolded so much either by my cat or by my brain.

Pamela

I had to go downtown today for the very mundane reason that I was almost out of Peridex and had to pick up another bottle from the dentist's office. I came home through the brown back yard, strewn with all the leaves last November's snow covered before I could mow them up; and glanced, by sheer habit, at the crumpled sodden leaves of one of last year's peonies. The snowdrops were up and blooming. They were not visible at all yesterday but today, there they were.

When I came upstairs I opened a lot of windows, and immediately heard the robins singing their evening song. The Cornell Ornithological Lab calls it their dawn song, and if Cornell says they sing it at dawn, then they do; but they also sing it in the evening, and sometimes when the sky darkens suddenly before a storm. In support of Cornell, I will add that they also sing it when the sun comes out after the storm is over.

I wish Minicon were earlier or later. Spring has come, and I don't want to sit around in a hotel. At least rain is forecast for part of the weekend.

Right now it's almost entirely clear except for some of those long, dark-gray clouds like islands, with Venus brightening above them.

Pamela

So when I got up this morning and staggered to the computer, blearily clutching my yoghurt and water and my pillbox with the anti-hypertensives in it, I started my morning routine and saw that Weather Underground had changed its format.  There is probably nothing wrong with the new one and I'll be used to it in a couple of weeks; but it's the first thing I look at after I check my email, and I was taken aback and cranky.

Then I decided that Adobe had been bugging me long enough about doing a "video update," so I carelessly told the persistent popup to install, already.  I don't know if it was really Adobe -- though they do always try to sneak MacAfee past me when I update things -- but I ended up with something that messed up my Firefox Start Page and kept popping up ads and exhortations to update this or install that, all things I did not recognize.  After a lot of poking around I discovered that the right name for this nonsense was Trovi.  Aside from the obligatory sponsored link, all the first hits were to pages telling you how to get rid of it.  I poked around more to make sure these weren't somehow compromised too, and then did what they told me, which involved downloading and running four different anti-virus, anti-malware programs.  Trovi is not technically a virus, they said, but it might as well be.  It appears to be gone now.

This all made me late running my errands, and I forgot to eat any lunch.  I deposited a check at the uptown TCF and then, feeling very woogly, ducked into Lund's for some kind of sustenance.  They used to have a really nice tuna salad sandwich, but I came away (studiously ignoring the sushi, which seemed too complicated to manage) with a hummus and vegetable wrap.  The vegetables were fresh and they had put fresh cilantro in it, but they seem to think hummus is a condiment like mustard, to be applied with care, rather than the entire protein source of the sandwich.  However, it did the trick, so I took a bus over to the Whittier Clinic and finally completed a three-day saga during which I ran out of my diuretic while my doctor didn't get to the refill request and then denied it without having anybody tell me why, or even that, she had.  The kindly pharmacist had to wrangle this information out of the clinic on Wednesday, and give me a week's worth to tide me over.  Then I had to make an appointment with a different doctor, because mine wasn't available until May 2 and, despite having noted that I needed lab work before she would refill the prescription, she hadn't actually issued an order for it, so I had to see an actual practitioner to get the order for the lab work.  The other doctor, whom I saw yesterday, was puzzled, because while he said it was useful to do lab work occasionally, it wasn't mandatory to refill the prescription.  They would usually refill the prescription and send me an email or a letter telling me to make an appointment.  I will say for them that the lab work was in my email inbox within six hours, and it all looks fine.  In any case, today, Friday, the pharmacy gave me the proper month's worth of my medication, this providing me with a nice five-day cushion in case of weirdness next month.  I had planned to walk home, but the lettuce wrap was expiring and I was grumpy and also for some reason uneasy.


I came home via the alley and the back yard, so as to admire the snowdrops and see if the crocuses were more than half an inch high.  I cannot report on this issue, because as I came up the path I saw a black object on the woodpile that I took for a crow.  Then I saw that it was a cat.  Then I saw that it was OUR cat.  I assumed it was Ninja, since he has the reputation for boldness.  I called him, grabbed him rudely by the scruff and tail when he came within reach, and hauled him inside, where he was discovered to be his sister, Nuit, instead.  She has white markings on her chest and underside, but the two of them don't look very different at a distance and through an adrenaline rush.

Arwen and Naomi came up to see me while I was making amends to Nuit, but there was no Ninja.  I checked in with David, checked all the open windows, grabbed a can of wet food, and ran back outside, where I discovered Ninja sniffing around under Lydy's bedroom window.  I lured him within reach with the food, grabbed him rudely, dumped him inside, and checked all the windows again.  No loose screens, no holes, all secure.  I went to see if Lydy, who is out for the day, had opened any windows in her bedroom, and was just in time to stop Ninja from going out the broken accordion of the window air conditioner, which was flapping in the breeze.  It was not, when I came to examine it later, squirrel-chewed.  I suspect feline intervention, possibly of long duration.

I shut him in the media room and his co-conspirator in the staircase, stole duct tape from David, who was in the middle of a complex software process that could not be left; and taped up the opening from both the inside and the outside.  Then I removed various objects that ordinarily hang over Lydy's bedroom door, shut it with a resounding bang, and put a large sign on it forbidding the presence of cats.

If alcohol didn't interact badly with my meds, I would have a very large drink right about now.  We live on a busy street, and while Ninja, who has escaped before, is chipped, Nuit, Miss Innocence as she used to be, is not.  They are young cats and we are exceedingly fond of them.  Little wretches.

Pamela

David went around the yard a week or two ago and took some splendid photos. You can look at them here.

I had a lovely time at Wiscon and managed not to bring any horrible viruses home with me. Raphael and I went to Murphy Hanrahan Regional Park earlier this week and saw clouds of dragonflies, mostly dot-tailed whitefaces with a leavening of frosted whitefaces, common whitetails, and at least one twelve-spotted and one four-spotted skimmer. Over the weekend Eric and I went to Eloise Butler, where we saw dozens of four-spotted skimmers and a goodly number of whitetails; not to mention two large and extremely oblivious wild turkeys browsing under the birdfeeders. We also went to Lebanon Hills Regional Park, where we were too late for dragonflies but delighted to see fireflies twinkling and flashing in the vegetation next to the fire road.

Also, I had a writing date with Pat WINOLJ, made copious notes, and wrote 500 or so new words on the Liavek novel. The style of the novel as written so far pleases me a lot, but it's rather mannered, and getting back into it will be interesting.

Pamela

The snowdrops came up all of a piece, leaves and drooping white flowers, three or four days ago. The purple snow crocuses are blooming in the front flower bed. The peony on the south side of the house is showing red shoots, as is the evil but beguiling Japanese knotweed. The bleeding-heart in the front flower bed has put up red-and-green shoots, already frilled with proto-leaves, right out of its mulch. The blue-and-yellow thug irises are putting up leaves, as is the burgundy one that hasn't bloomed much in recent years. I should feed that one.

The dames' rocket and the motherwort have greened up. The daylilies are four to eight inches high, depending on where they are. The bare earth of the south side yard is filling up with tiny violet leaves, a bit of periwinkle, and the aforementioned Japanese knotweed. The grass is greening up. There are small leaves on both mock-orange bushes, and on the neighbors' peabush hedge. I really ought to rake the leaves off the remaining plants, but I have a deep conviction that we are going to pay for this weather with sub-zero temperatures and a raging blizzard, pretty much ANY TIME NOW. So I walk around in bemusement instead.

Ari and I saw a morning-cloak butterfly a few days ago, sunning itself on the back of a lawn chair. I've also seen various small flies and beetles, but no queen bumblebees yet, and no green darners.

Juncoes are still here, and there are so many I think they may be either passing through or preparing to leave. We have a pair of cardinals, which is always cheering. The chickadees and house sparrows and house finches are singing in their various ways, and crows are rattling.

In a rash frenzy, I ordered a bunch of plants from the Lake Country School just down the street. They used to send out six-year-olds with forms to go door to door, and you never knew exactly what you would get when you went to pick up your plants. But now everything is online. I confidently expect that the edited manuscript of my book, with a short deadline for return, will land on me on the weekend I am supposed to pick up the plants.

The mint hasn't come back yet, which concerns me. If it doesn't, I had better buy three plants of it and put them in different locations. This is a good recipe for disaster, but maybe the mint can fight back the Japanese knotweed.

Pamela