Beds, seeds, a computer, poetry and ... ouch!
Woody had been trying to find someone to create raised beds for us in the two upper gardens. Nobody seemed terribly interested in the job and when they did give a quote, it was beyond our budget. Finally he found a way he could do some himself. The uppermost garden [the Rosa Luxembourg vegetable garden] he is going to turn into raised beds for me. The main garden will be all his to plant. We will both work on the lower garden, that already has 2 raised beds I planted last spring. They worked out very well and gave us excellent pumpkins and winter squash. I am eager to get back to gardening. I enjoy it, it makes me feel good and useful, I get into the sun and good air, we feast off the organic produce and it’s good exercise. I find most exercise boring except for walking and light hand held weights. But gardening except in the hottest weather is the kind of exercise that makes me feel good. I finally got back to the short story I began in November. Forward progress was stalled by reading mss for my juried intensive poetry workshop and being fiction editor of 5th Wednesday for an issue, a job that included soliciting stories from authors whose work I know. Then I had the regional and national Jose Gouveia memorial contests sponsored by WOMR. Now I’m back to writing. Several new poems and the story finally polished. A trickle of mss is still arriving for the poetry workshop, but I’ve read 117 so far. The class is filled although I’m getting some excellent mss. I preaccept for next year. I’ve been working with the poets on lodging and transportation. We finished out work on the seed orders Sunday. Since then Melenie and I have been making the actual orders. Five have gone out so far. I find choosing seeds a pleasure. I feel the turning of the year. I switched to a MAC in 2010 after being on a PC sine ’82. But my Mac had developed a number of problems. Also I could not update things like Adobe because my operating system was too old. I could no longer see videos. It had weird bad habits of suddenly erasing blocks instead of single files. Etc. So I got a new iMac, turning in the old after having it wiped. Once I didn’t do that thoroughly and the person I gave it to was smirking about stuff she had managed to read in spite of my amateur wipe. It’s a bit skittish, the new computer, but much faster than my old and with less bad habits. Last Sunday I decided to do every exercise my previous PT had given me because my knees were behaving themselves. The result was that my left knee swelled up the size of a melon and I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t walk. It was the worst pain I’d experienced since that first week out of hospital. I iced and iced and iced but finally halfway through the evening, around 9 pm, things started to improve and I could walk again, however awkwardly. By the next morning, almost all the swelling had gone. My knees remain a bit stiff but otherwise I’m mobile again. It was a serious scare. I had to take painkillers. I feared I’d totally screwed knee and possibly both. Today things are fine again. I’m not doing that again.We have a very light coating of snow over the gardens – not enough to do anything with. It looked for a while as if we would have a real storm but then it just stopped. We had tufted titmice at the feeder, a pair, for the first time this winter. I love their name. Say it three times tufted titmice tufted titmice tufted titmice.