An Empty Greenhouse Awaits the Seedlings

The storm predicted to hit us hard, didn’t.  We had gusty winds most of the night, but nothing resembling the 83 mph winds that toppled two trees in the last storm,  including my gorgeous red crabapple.  We never lost power this time.  It was a relief. Woody is still hauling branches to the dump.

We have been readying the storeroom with the long sink left over from the my ex-husband’s photography hobby as well as the greenhouse because I’ll be starting seeds Wednesday. There should be two six-packs of red cabbage of three kinds, two six-packs of broccoli of two kinds. curly parsley, Italian parsley, bok choi, cilantro and two of salad bowl lettuce.  That’s not the tastiest lettuce we grow, but it likes being started inside and makes for our earliest salads before all the other lettuce types are sown directly in one of my raised beds.

I haven’t read anything for pleasure except the issue of ARCHEOLOGY magazine, that I read a bit of in bed every night.  I’ve been instead reading the huge pile of manuscripts first for the regional and second, the national, Jose Gouveia WOMR poetry contests.  I hope to finish up this coming week so I can get back to my own work, but it’s been a week with a lot of interrupts.

A chimney sweep has to fix our fireplace/furnace chimney.  Willow has her annual vet appointment on Wednesday, the day my poetry group meets in the evening here.  Then on Friday I have a very lengthy and what is always a very unpleasant appointment for my glaucoma.  They keep you waiting endlessly and sometimes the technicians are so rough, I have to ice and then heat my neck and shoulders. I hate going there, but they are where I have to go.

Then next Sunday @ 2 EST, I take part in a conversation on ZOOM with Terry Bisson, moderated by an editor from PM Press.  It focusses on the influence of the Viet Nam War on science fiction and speculative fiction.  I am fond of Bisson’s novel, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN.  He has an incredible imagination.

Saturday night, a couple is coming over who hosted us the last time I read on Nantucket.  She’s the new director of the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown and he’s a poet.  We’re looking forward to meeting them again.  They were very good to us then. I even got a poem about of it, “The body in the hot-tub.”

The two remaining cats are growing more and more friendly, now that they have lost their beloved Mingus.  They both spent a lot of time with him, Willow washing him, cuddling and sleeping with him and wrestling; Schwartzie mostly chasing him and hanging out together.  Now both lie on the bed, not cuddling but companiable. They take turns getting attention from each of us.

We had snow last week, but it’s all gone now.  We had some very mild days. Today is clear and sunny but cold.  It just eased above freezing in the last half hour.

I hate Monday holidays.  It’s never a holiday. It just means I do the regular laundry and often something extra thrown in, like a duvet cover. Then I work with Dale on Tuesday instead. It throws everything off.  I wish they’d move the extra day to Friday, and then it would feel like a real three-day weekend.