Reading: The Green Knight

Not yet given up on: John Milton, Paradise Lost; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

On deck: Don Quijote

Moving: walked 2.5 miles

15 April 2002: Garden prep

I hope it's cold tonight, or cooler, as has been forecast. Then I can clean the house and maybe read and post. Earlier this month I was in one of my worse funks, neither posting nor emailing nor talking nor anything that I didn't have to, and I was stressed. I'm better now, loquacious again; one of the reasons I'm better is that I'm busier, so posting less.

I'd walked to work or back a couple of times before last week, but last week I steeled up my resolve and walked to and fro four days, twenty miles. Then both days this weekend I partook of serious physical labor. I know I'm delusional, but I already feel better. Well, that I feel better isn't delusional. That I think I'm skimming fat rather than surfing endorphins is delusional.

Friday we set out for Home Despot right after I got home from work. And Blake, I should say, does not like my walking to work, or needs to reset his body clock. He is used to my getting home around 4:25, and that's when he wants me and his dinner. Walking, I get home at 4:45, and the report is that he paces and whines. There have been times I've been ordinarily late taking the bus, because of traffic or running an errand after work, and he's been similarly frantic then. RDC became convinced that Blake has that pet-sense when the bird would let out a holler just before I walked in the door; that's just cute. Frantic is not.

Anyway, at Home Despot we rented a rototiller and wrested it into Cassidy. Among the few things at which I am expert is procrastinating--fr'instance, I am almost out of contact lenses but have not found a new optometrist--and I was quite proud of myself for doing the tilling so far in advance of when the plants should arrive. Also of remembering to order the plants in time. At Wild Oats we found dinner, and at home we watched "Jaws," because did I seriously think that I was going to make it to its midnight showing at the Mayan? Watching it at home, cuddly and comfortable and in much more comfortable seating than has ever been dreamt of in the Mayan philosophy is not quite as scary as seeing it in public on a big screen, but close enough.

I still mind that no one except its master notices Pippin's disappearance. I don't think slapping Chief Brody does much good, but am I the only one who cares about the dog? And the "Indianapolis" scene is among the best in the history of film.

Saturday. I didn't have The Green Knight by the bed so after finishing Nickel and Dimed read The Greenlanders and dozed a bit. One of the reasons I know I'm better is that I'm waking easily and early again, but before sunrise on a Saturday is a little too early.

RDC asked if I wanted him to operate the rototiller, and I said no, just to keep an eye on me for when I would inevitably slice off my foot. I have never used a power mower. I still don't understand about the choke. Not only the large gas-powered blades but the pull-starter was new to me. So, I'm ashamed to say, he started it for me. And despite the rental clerk explaining how to use it and the instruction sheet I'd read, I was pleased for him, the confident one, to use it so I could see how scary it wasn't.

I felt like an extra in "Urban Cowboy," if that's the one with the mechanical bull. The front yard was like sod, so matted with grass was it, and the rototiller had something like a ploughshare at the back that you could (but probably shouldn't) step on to press it into the ground. This ploughshare hadn't yet been beaten out of a sword and I wasn't up to dueling with it, so when RDC volunteered to most of it I only too gladly accepted. Blah.

And again to Home Despot, this time to return the thing, and I was glad I picked it up Friday evening instead of Saturday morning or early afternoon. I waited in line almost half an hour to return it while RDC found wood to make new moulding for the upstairs landing and brick edging for the front garden against the sidewalk. Home again and after a smoothie break, I attacked the easement, hoeing the perimeter where the rototiller couldn't reach, sifting the clumps of sod, preserving as much soil as I could, hauling the clumps to the back, pegging landscaping cloth down. (The cloth purportedly lets water and air but not sunlight through.)

Last May, I fetched two Cassidyloads of mulch from the city's TreeCycle program. That portion I didn't use has lain idly on a tarp next to the garage ever since. Worms loved the earth underneath, and I harvested them for the vegetable garden, where I hope they didn't die. Now I hauled that mulch, minus some for the raspberry bushes, to the front, and covered as much of the easement as I could. Groundcover for that will happen later. Under the mulch tarp, the ground was then bare and moist and worm infested, and I dumped the easement clods there. Either the worms will attack that too or abandon the area, I hope for the vegetable garden. I would even carry them there if they would ask.

Then I was done for the day and we watched "Sexy Beast," which is a bizarre movie. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover" is a bizarre movie, but comprehensible from first to last. I liked SB's "Fight Club"esque hallucinations, but what the beast was meant to convey I entirely missed. Plus we kept subtitles on for most of the movie. Which was in English, but Cockney, or something, British. I might have followed "Nil by Mouth," another movie starring Ray Winstone, better, if I had remembered captions for it too. I didn't need captions in "Trainspotting" as much as I did in this.

Sunday I hoed along the sidewalk and lay the brick-like lengths of border. I have two hopes, both ill-founded: that they will not settle too much or slant across the sidewalk, and that they will be enough to hold back any soil that runs off the slope. Then I sifted the entire area, grass from dirt, leaving the dirt and tossing clumps onto a tarp. Sometime when I'm bored and motivated, I'll go back and massage each clod through the screen, to extract even more dirt. Yeah.

I raked the area smooth. Several of the sprinkler heads from the system the librarian-owners installed were overgrown and I guess we're lucky we didn't rototill them into oblivion. But all the heads on the property are along the periphery, where the rototiller didn't penetrate. I would like to add some compost there, but the plants I ordered like arid conditions so well that too much nitrogen makes them grumpy. Or something. I do have some amendments to add in the two weekends before I expect delivery.

Then I had a smoothie, made by RDC, who also kept my water bottle full all day.

When I ordered soil for the vegetable garden last year, I think I got a lot more than the three cubic yards my 6x12x1 frame needed. Having no other place to put it, I dumped it between the garden frame and the back fence. Now I shoveled it out, covering the easement clumps with a tarp and piling the dirt onto that. My theory was that if worms love the moist darkness under the mulch tarp, they'll also like the clods under the dirt tarp. Delusional, as I say. Having cleared all the dirt out, I filled the area with the front garden clumps.

We are supposed to get wind and rain today and tomorrow, so I took the tarp off the almost-gone leaf pile and another off the vegetable garden and pegged them over the front garden. It is so dry the erosion could easily be very bad but I don't want to lay groundcloth until I've amended the soil. But that wasn't enough tarpage, so when RDC went out for cable for the stereo, I asked him to get another tarp. While I waited for him to get back, I repotted petunias and planted cherry tomato seeds. Both of these things I bought Saturday. I usually don't get potted flowers until May, but it's so warm already I couldn't wait; and if the petunias are early, the tomatoes are late, but this was the first time I found cherry tomato seeds.

When RDC returned, he had forgotten the tarp. This meant that I was done! Hooray! I had already put almost everything away, so I just put the last of it away, hosed off my feet, doffed everything in the back landing and threw the clothes into the basement, and scarpered for the shower. I looked about like Day Six of the Radish Cure.

I haven't been that filthy since my last Dead show, which was held in an abandoned airfield in Highgate, Vermont, June 1995. We walked from the campsite to the show and back, with some busing here and there, with sunscreen and bug repellent and sweat and lots of dirt. My hair was stiff with dust when I woke up in the morning, and I was so desperate for water I considered bathing in Lake Champlain. However, cleanliness doesn't seem like a state that would result from such a body of water, and I had woken before dawn (three weeks before solstice that far north: damn early) so all I had to do was wait for the office to open so I could buy a shower. And a good thing I did, because by the time everyone else--I might have been the only one not hung over or otherwise impaired--woke up, the hot water was gone baby gone.

RDC had forgotten the tarp but remembered dinner. The plan was our all-too-regular, oh-so-beloved Sunday night Chipotle burritos, but instead he bought us a pair of ribeye steaks to grill. Much better. Baked potatoes, chard sauteed in wine and oil with garlic, and a hunk of beef. It was a very long time while the potatoes baked, but of course my steak only had to be grilled through to bleu, with none of that pesky waiting for it to be actually cooked. I lit into my meal like Eustace with a wild goat.

Afterward, we watched the Tivo'd "60 Minutes." Tivo will be a great thing for summer. RDC was asleep halfway through the second story and I didn't make it through the third; "Simpsons" and "Malcolm" must have been repeats because Tivo didn't get those either; and so we hauled ourselves up to bed before 9:00, which surprised Blake somewhat.

I took 750 milligrams of ibuprofen before I went to bed and today I am sore but not stiff. I'm vaguely impressed. And I walked to work today. I love Possession. Tonight I plan to do some of the housework I didn't do this weekend, but actually I'll probably collapse on the couch.

Yes, the couch arrived! That's why RDC is fiddling with speakers and wire and so forth. The living room is not the rumpus room of movies and projects and so forth that the den is. It is for music and reading, and Blake, we have agreed, is not allowed on its furniture. It took Blake about 90 seconds to figure out that the space between couch and wall is a great cave, and that's fine. He can spelunk if he wants. His hormonal surge is over, so it took him days, not 90 seconds, to realize that he is in love with the new couch.

I can hide towels and table napkins and socks and dusting rags and tie-dye shirts, but how am I supposed to hide a couch?