Reading: Fire and Hemlock

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: "An Awfully Big Adventure" on IFC

16 August 2000: Return to civilization

Erp. We, um, have television now. Actually I'm being optimistic; the satellite elves are supposed to show up this afternoon. It should go easily, as the previous owner had a dish and the cabling should fit in any of the four piercings the house has endured for the benefit of its television-watching inhabitants. She took her dish with her, to which I said "Good riddance." However, in the debate pitting digital cable against satellite against whatever else there is, the dish won. People I work with scorn cable entirely and make do with broadcast, which is an alien concept to me. I didn't know televisions still could receive broadcast signals. They particularly don't when your television lives in the basement, as mine does. I want a television-free main living area. However, with my television I want my CNN. And M2, oooo.

I was glad to ditch the television aerial when my mother had cable installed in her house. (And though she did it to placate my prodigal father, who'd had cable in his trailer, he was most displeased to learn that the she had taken cable dude's advice and allowed him to drill a hole in the corner of the floor, since the television lived against the opposite short wall of the house from where the utilities entered and the cable could travel through the basement and upward. Perhaps my father would have preferred to have cable strung around three sides of the house and a new exterior hole drilled. What he thought the alternatives were I don't know.) Now I'm having a dish on my roof. On the back of my roof, but still. I'd love to rip off the redundant cables, because the back of the house is awash with them, but since I'm not sure which are redundant, I'm just leaving them alone, unsightly or not.

Yesterday I borrowed a stack of books from the 'brary on xeriscape gardening and landscaping. I wonder how our neighbors will react to stuff like buffalo grass. They can't possibly find it more offensive than dead Kentucky bluegrass, which is what's there now. I found a book on native xeriplants of the Front Range. I discovered that although blueberries and elderberries just won't live here, gooseberries and currants are even native. I'm thinking of planting some between the apricot and the pear trees.

Speaking of which, RDC thinks the apricot is maybe a nectarine. Someone or other in Connecticut was surprised that our apricots hadn't ripened yet, which I attributed to the difference in climate. Now that the fruit are bigger and changing color from green, I wonder if yes, they might be nectarines, which would explain their maturing later. They're yellow with areas of red. They're not fuzzy, like apricots. Neither are they anywhere near mature, nor likely to show their best faces given the stress the tree's undergone this year. When RDC suggested this last night, we were eating supper on the patio in the dusky evening and it was too dark to find a ripe specimen. I'll have to examine a pit. I'm hoping apricots, which I've seldom eaten fresh, have smooth stones like plums. If it's got a brainy stone I'll call it a nectarine.

I had never bothered to look up the type of tree and we've been calling it an apricot solely because the seller called it an apricot tree. You know how human fetus look reptilian then fishlike before getting around to looking human? Similarly, I'm not so good with the difference between little baby unripe fruits that're basically spherical and green, which is what we had until about last Friday. The getting redder, which apricots don't, was our first clue. Today I found a fruit tree field guide which gives apricot leaves as near-round heart-shapes. The leaves on our tree are longer and shaped like spear points, so the penny has finally dropped. I'm waiting for the fruit to ripen a bit more to be certain. Which it might do, finally. Yesterday we had rain, and today we had a big crashing thunderstorm right overhead for about 20' and it rained, at least drizzling but often bucketing, for two solid hours. You could feel the grass stretch and yawn as it woke from its parched slumber. We're finally into monsoon season and expect precipitation for the next several days, praise be; this is one of the driest summers on record.

Except that the previous owner called it an apricot tree. Could she have been so oblivious? I can't name a tree from its bark or leaves unless it's something obvious like a maple, but I can name one when I'm eating its fruit.

So. Monday I ate the first of our pears. "Firm" doesn't begin to describe its texture. But it was ours, and the flavor was fine. The plums are still plummeting.

I think the chart of the lot I made back in May is in the tube with my posters (never to be hung again, probably, but neither ever to be thrown out), which is in turn in the box with the tall things. RDC was looking for something or other like his flyrod and I told him it was in the box with the tall narrow things. HAO folded over laughing, but I don't think RDC found this a helpful description. I had a tall, narrow box and in it I put my poster tube, the wrapping paper, RDC's flyrod, his fishing pole (something we'll carry with us always without his ever using again, I suspect), and some umbrellas.

Anyway. I need to find that. And I pray it's accurate. I laboriously taped together graph paper, which I had only in 8.5"x11" sheets. Garden planning stuff suggests one box in the graph per foot, but whoever designs garden planning software doesn't know how small I write. I've got graph paper with 100 boxes per square inch, maybe more. I should buy a big pad with maybe 36 squares per inch. I did know the lot size at the time, just not the placement of house and trees and garage and fence. If I only have to ink in the permanent bits and not tape sheets of paper together anymore I'll be happy.

I've been wondering what to do under the cherry tree. Overall, I'm trying not to overestimate the amount of gardening I can do. Underall, those cherry pits chafe my hide. Actually they chafe my feet. I want a low-water, shade-tolerant ground cover that will cover thoroughly such that pits falling through foliage don't germinate. Or at least not all of them.

We have to figure out how to border the edges of the property in the front, which is unfenced. I'm thinking there has to be a barrier of some sort, to protect my garden from the ravaging of mowers.

And speaking of mowers, our neighbors on both sides have gas push mowers, even though their yards are no bigger than ours. Is a reel mower that freaky a concept? But what really chafes my hide--again--is seeing all these grass clippings in the dumpster. Someone waters their yard enough that it needs mowing (one thing about having nothing but dormant grass is that the mowing's a snap!), even during this excessively dry summer, and then mows it with some sort of bag such that the clippings don't return their moisture and nutrients to the soil, and then chokes a landfill with clippings instead of mulching them. I want to put a big sign on the dumpster: "Don't be a fuckwit. Let me compost your overwatered nonnative clippings." But I don't think that will go over well.

Anyway, garden. That's the next project.

And what kind of work are we going to get done on the garden or the interior of the house with television to watch, now that it's watchable? Does a dish mean I'll be able to mainline the Olympics next month?

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