freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with ineffectual druiding

I had a lovely clean-up a month or two back, I called a junk-removal firm and they came and hauled away a bunch of random detritus, old LARP props and bits of wood left over from bookshelf construction and the Rowing Machine of Unused Reproach which has sat in the shed forever. And a whole stack of gardening stuff, old pots full of soil and leaves and spiders (it's weirdly difficult to get rid of played-out soil when you don't actually have any ground on your entirely paved property) and the slowly-disintegrating empty wooden planter and what have you. It was all very satisfying, and the back courtyard looks lovely and much, much neater.

Until Spring started happening, over the last few weeks, and I thought, hang on, why aren't my flame lilies sprouting? And I checked the pot I thought they were in, and it was just soil, no tubers. I have been growing those flame lilies with great success for six or seven years now, the pot should have been chock-full of roots. So much so that in fact I transplanted them into a bigger pot at the end of last season, and I realised, with growing horror, that I must have mixed up the pots when the junk guy was here, and kept the old empty one, and thrown out the new one full of flame lily tubers.

I cannot lie, readers, I lost it. Emotional regulation not so much at the moment, and I loved those flame lilies with the deep and complicated love of a girl for her over-coded floral symbol. I raged a bit, and cried, and alarmed my mother rather a lot (she has just been in CT for three weeks, it was lovely, although I am still too tired to have done much with her, it was a very quiet three weeks pottering around mostly at home). And when I'd calmed down and regained a sense of proportion and hied me, as is inevitable, to the internet, a search was unavailing: none of the local garden places appear to have tubers in stock at the moment, the market is signally un-aflame. I had sadly resigned myself to a non-flaming spring.

Until I was pottering around watering things the other day, and realised that the pot I'd checked, and which had been signally lacking tubers, was gently sprouting the characteristic flame lily sprouts in about three different places. Out of, mark you, apparently barren soil.

I am, naturally, calloo-ing and callaying all over the show, I have not, in fact, screwed up stupidly! or if I have, it's non-fatally. But I am also deeply confused. My current top three theories:

I didn't mix up the pots, this is the original one and I hallucinated transplanting them. (Actually not impossible, my memory at the moment is the exact opposite of reliable, or reliable only in the sense of being reliably useless). This does not, however, explain why in my initial check sifting through the top half of the pot for tubers revealed absolutely no tubers, they are unlikely to have sunk gently to the bottom like whalefall.
I did mix up the pots, this is the original one and I threw out the one with all the transplanted tubers; however, the flame lilies madly self-seeded last season before I transplanted them, and are now growing happily from seed. This is unlikely only because flame lilies are apparently very difficult to grow from seed.
I did mix up the pots, this is the original one and I threw out the one with all the transplanted tubers; however, I half-assed the transplant process and only got the top half of the tubers, not realising there were more down the bottom of the pot. This is vaguely likely, particularly since the new shoots are a bit later in the season than usual, I suspect they may have had to trek up from the depths like Orpheus from the underworld.

I am going, in the absence of further conclusive evidence, with (3) as the probable sequence of events. Gratefully, and with relief. A spring without flame lilies was going to be weirdly desolate.

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two-line answers in which he variously tells me all the inventively wrong things he has tried to do to make this mysterious thing happen and which haven't worked, and I cannot tell him what the right thing to do is because he WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT THE CHANGE IS! Given that I am sending increasingly annoyed emails with careful caps, underlining and bolds to try and make him focus on the question, I am being left floored and slightly breathless at the magnitude of the reading comprehension fail he is demonstrating. Honestly, he'll never survive a liberal arts degree if he can't read a simple question. And I'm very close to the point, given my current 12-hour days and 300-odd emails daily, of simply not answering any more. Because really.

Registration continues to melt down gently, we now have 70% of students having submitted, two days before the deadline, and have processed 65% of those. The proliferation of both reg submissions and queries to my inbox is being echoed, in more concrete terms, in my home environment, by various insectoid and other incursions, which likewise give the impression of scurrying masses imperfectly contained and erroneously misdirected. The cockroach outbreak has, merciful heavens be thanked, been more or less contained by the efforts of the landlord, who replaced the rotted sink backboard (thereby revealing millions of the little fuckers nesting madly in the rotting wood, as I had darkly suspected) and then made merry mayhem with cockroach insecticide all down the skirtings. I have a few desperate stragglers, but they are punch-drunk and staggering, and I dispatch them with extreme prejudice, and the kitchen no longer skitters when I switch on the light suddenly at 2am owing to sleepwalking, weird noises or the sudden need for the loo.

The more recent problem is the hitherto flourishing violet I had in a pot in the passage, which suddenly, a week ago, went all lacy-leaved on me instead of its previously happy and stalwart green, and I picked a couple of caterpillars off it, muttered strange gardening oaths, and though nothing more of it. Except the leaves continued to get lacier, and I rooted through them a bit to find more caterpillars, unearthed one or two, and eventually got the hell in and rustled the whole plant vigorously. Upon which there was a sort of squidgy, squirming shower, and about 20 browny-green caterpillars in assorted sizes, from mini to Economy, were left writhing disconsolately on the tiles. I have done that twice more on two subsequent days, to diminishing returns, and I think I may finally have eradicated them all, but really. Butterflies are pretty and all, but there are Limits.

Oh wait. 9-email student has just got back to me, via a futile and error-ridden detour through the Law faculty, with the final, grudging admission that he wants to move to Law, and a wild and exaggerately favourable reading of his eligibility for same in terms of school-leaving scores. I have disabused him of his various misconceptions, and am left reeling slightly at the though of the havoc his particular brand of wilful misreading could wreak on the innocent law profession. Lawks.

(My subject line is, of course, the Inchworm song, which I know through Danny Kaye on the Muppets, and re-watching the gentle sweetness of which has just soothed a lot of my irritation. On Youtube. My caterpillar infestation isn't nearly as cute.)

Yesterday was a public holiday*. Owing to the featureless slide of pandemic days spent working from home, I had completely forgotten about this, so I staggered out of bed at a quarter to eight as usual, placated the cats, watered the garden, sat down at my desk and cleared my inbox before realising, an hour later, that I needn't be working, actually. Apparently the pandemic and attendant socio-cultural wossnames is capable of delivering pleasant surprises occasionally. Pleased, I spent the rest of the Day of Reconciliation peaceably slaughtering raiders and supermutants in Fallout, so at least I was on theme.

Other tiny silver linings to this year's horrible black clouds: working from home means I am actively and somewhat more effectually druiding than usual. The giant granadilla vine in the big box died a few months back, which I honestly don't think was me, the neighbour's spirited attempt at Audrey II died at the same time, so I am darkly suspecting a granadilla-fancying disease. Possibly COVID. In the spirit of battening down the hatches in an apocalypse, I tried planting veggies again, which worked appallingly when I tried it when I first moved in here (I killed tomatoes! tomatoes are unkillable!), but which has seemed to benefit from the continuous attention. I now have broad beans, and spring onions, and fancy dark-leaved lettuce! One bean plant randomly died for some reason, I think something gnawed its feet off, I shall cautiously put a baby tomato into the gap and hope.

* Day of Reconciliation, which is, if you think about it, a bizarrely edgy and blood-soaked sort of commemoration, representing as it does two opposed military achievements: the Afrikaner victory over the Zulus at Blood River, and the founding of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing in the struggle years, and its subsequent campaign of bombings etc. Which didn't, I have to say, create nearly the body count of Blood River. I find the duality of the date to offer rather an odd notion of "reconciliation". More of a meaningful nod, with aggressive eye contact, from the new dispensation to the old. And ritualistically and slightly threateningly remembering war doesn't seem to me to be a good basis for peace, really.

My subject line is T S Eliot, weirdly, the one oddly rhythmic and rhyming bit in the middle of "Burnt Norton" which I've always loved, and around which I once wrote a largely unsuccessful science fiction story which was rejected, with a very nice note, by an sf magazine.

Student funding application deadline this week, which means my inbox has been flooded with last-minute students needing my advisor signature on their appeals, leading to such student gems as "Do I qualify for the course I want to add?" with no further details. My life is not made measurably better by the need to fire off frequent emails in the genre of "Which course, exactly, do you want to add?" and its ilk. I personally think my patience is commendable, the poor little buggers are all stressed to hell and I mostly manage to refrain from biting them.

Work continues to be infested with annoying dictates from On High, all sublimely detached from the realities of actual students or staff. The repetive nature of this is not contributing in any positive way to the rather alarmingly featureless nature of days spent working from home: one day is very like the next, each week is indistinguishable from the previous, time goes very fast and I genuinely lose track of what day it is. Friday today, apparently, which is nice. I could do with a weekend. The last one was either a month and a half ago or yesterday, one or the other.

The one interesting thing which has inserted some sort of change into the uniform parade of days is the realisation, a few weeks ago, that the city relaxed water restrictions at the start of November: all the dams are full, we are now allowed to water gardens before 9am or after 6pm with hand-held hoses. Presumably this means we're no longer obliged to restrict showers or put grey water into the loo, but it turns out that a few years of water-saving obsession will hardwire you quite effectively, thank you. I am still saving grey water, it feels deeply wrong not to. It's lovely to be able to wander around the container garden with a hose if I need to, the grey water has never been quite enough to cover it and I used to have to ration carefully and endure the poor plants being a bit thirsty in hot weather, but even if they're gasping I have to quite deliberately overcome the knee-jerk reluctance to turn on the tap. Which is terribly lawful good, and probably not a bad thing.

My subject line is, I realise, Magnetic Fields; the phrase has been wandering disconnectedly around my brain all day, without context or identity, and it's been driving me insane. More insane. 2020 is a good year for insanity.

Longtime denizens of this blog may remember the supermarket seed promotion thingy a couple of years back, with the magical compressed soil, which gave me one vigorous viola plant and a couple of leggy vegetables which subsequently fell over and died. Not so the viola, which grew happy faces madly all that year, and died back that winter only to sprout again the following year in a couple of self-seeded plants in not only the original pot, but a couple of adjacent ones.

This was, it transpires, merely the advance guard. This year the three or four plants from last season clearly self-seeded again, and with somewhat promiscuous enthusiasm, as the small velvet-faced army has reached every corner of the courtyard.

This exuberant audience (I'm thinking the stands at a sports event with no social distancing at all) is growing in the strawberry planter, having seized the opportunity left by evil snail cohorts eating the strawberries to the ground. Not pictured: the actual mint plant the violas have actually choked out of existence, what the hell. Usually mint needs napalm to discourage it.

There used to be a chilli bush in there, but it succumbed to seasonal depression after two years of resurgence, and I haven't found a replacement yet. (COVID is making for some really odd gaps in the local nursery's offerings).

There are stunted, miniaturised violas springing up at the edges of the thrice-damned astroturf and in the cracks in the brickwork all over the courtyard. Occasionally I accidentally weed them and remorsefully stick them into soil elsewhere, whereupon they cheerfully grow Much Bigger, with almost audible squeals of vegetative glee. There's a small scouting party at the base of the lemon tree now, and I can see it eying the pomegranate.

This is the result of clipping the blossoms before ripping the plants out of the pots where the flame lily and arums are trying desperately to Sprout for Spring amid thickets of the Viola Empire. It would have felt more brutal and cruel except that there are So Many Violas elsewhere in the garden, and the resulting vase is rather lovely.

In a spirit of emulation, I have denuded several volunteer poppies in the road outside of their mature seedheads, and scattered them all over the courtyard. Next spring will be all-out war. In a good way.

(My subject line is still Amazing Devil, because hyperfixation).

Life doesn't actually give me random lemons with any notable success, my potted lemon tree is one of those knobbly-skinned ones which gives me more evil poisonous spine encounters than anything else whenever I try to water, prune or move it. It has quite a nice outbreak of blossom this year but has only ever produced one small, knobbly, inedible fruit in past years. And the one "lime tree" I bought from the nursery turned out to be, in defiance of its labelling, a sort of miniature ornamental thingy which produces tiny mini-me orangey wossnames notable mainly for the incredible faces Jo used to pull while eating them off the bush, as they're excessively sour. I should, as she suggests, probably try making miniature marmalade with them, sourness is, I feel, a deeply desirable marmalade quality.

So, when the craving for lemon hits me, which it does reasonably regularly, I have to buy them like anyone else, or at the very least resort to the fruit basket on my sideboard, which as a result of my grocery shopping reflexes almost always has lemons in it in case of a break-glass-if-lemon-craving situation. And when the lemon craving hits me simultaneously with a random cheesecake yen, I get creative.

My favourite cheesecake recipe is that BoingBoing wake-up mocha one (warning, (a) that's an incredibly annoying comic format recipe, I generated a proper handwritten one for actual cooking purposes, and (b) BoingBoing's downside in terms of its geeky owners is that they're very good at bypassing adblockers, which means I've almost entirely stopped reading it because the ads are so annoying). Below is my creative lemon variation. It makes a dense, smooth, rich, slightly moist cheesecake which I am now craving again, dammit.

DUAL-CRAVING LEMON CHEESECAKE

Philosophical preamble: white chocolate is not chocolate. It is An Abomination Unto Nuggan which has a nerve attempting to share chocolate's hallowed name. It is better classified as a sort of lame, offensive and inferior cheese. However, it has a tiny and marginal right to exist solely in order to enrich lemon cheesecake, as below. I will not be taking questions or criticism on this point.

450g cream cheese
30ml flour
120ml caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
finely-chopped zest of at a lemon, or two lemons if you're like me and like it sour
1 tblsp lemon juice
200g evil white chocolate, attempting to expiate its sins

Biscuit crust: 1 200g pack digestive biscuits; 60g butter, melted; 1 tblsp honey; anything between 1 tsp and 1 heaped tblsp ground ginger, to taste. (More is better in my book).

Preheat oven to 180^oC (350^oF). Break the white chocolate into blocks and melt it (I do it in a glass jug in the microwave at half power, but you can be fancy and do it in a double boiler over hot water) and leave to cool for a bit.
Make biscuit crust by crumbling the biscuits finely (I use the food processor, or the pestle from my pestle and mortar, or the bottom of a glass bottle. This can be vindictively cathartic to do by hand.) Stir in ground ginger.
- Melt butter and honey together in the microwave and add to biscuit crumbs, mixing well.
- Press into bottom and sides of buttered pie plate, smoothing and compressing with the back of a spoon.
- Bake at 180^oC for ten minutes. Turn oven down to 160^oC (320^oF) when you've taken the crust out.
Beat the cream cheese slightly to soften and remove lumps, and add the eggs, sugar, flour and vanilla.
Beat until smooth and add the lemon juice and zest; beat again.
Pour in the melted white chocolate and mix until smooth.
Pour into baked biscuit crust and bake at 160^o for 40 minutes or so.
This is particularly good if you cook down a small punnet of raspberries in the rest of the juice from the lemons to make a coulis, and spread on top of the cheesecake.

The major terrors of COVID - actual COVID, COVID side effects, death, food shortages, economic collapse - are all a bit distant to those of us in my fortunate position, but the minor terrors will get you every time. See: car battery, yesterday. Today I braved Uber and hit Rondebosch to get a prescription filled and buy the next two weeks' worth of groceries, and... um. This mask thing. It's bloody horrible.

Problem one: I don't like things on my head, I get claustrophobic and a bit panicky. I don't wear hats, I did fourteenth century in the SCA so I didn't have to wear smothering veils (I trained myself into a very light circlet by sheer bloody-mindedness), and traditional Muslim is right out for a variety of reasons only partially related to my rampant and incurable atheism. Having something on my face is awful, even the swanky, shaped and pleated, nurse-approved mask I ran up over the weekend; I feel compressed and trapped and desperate even before having to deal with the sound of my own breathing.

Problem two: masks are not designed for people who, owing to really weak vision and bumpy eyelids which preclude contact lenses, have to wear glasses. Wearing a mask, your glasses steam up with every breath you exhale, even with the glasses over the top of the mask. I bumbled around the supermarket panicky from face-coverage and double panicky from not being able to see a bloody thing because of the misted glasses. My heart started racing and I got all lightheaded, which I realised after a bit was because I was unconsciously holding my breath so I could see enough to buy the products I actually wanted rather than those immediately to their left, or in a different aisle entirely but with the same approximate colour of packaging. It was not, shall we say, my favourite shopping expedition of recent times.

But there are some pleasant, minor side effects. Either regulations have relaxed a bit or Checkers is a lot more laissez faire than Pick'n'Pay, because they sold me a giant bottle of organic kelp-derived plant food without so much as an eyelid twitch, so I can druid slightly more effectually. And the Uber guys offered the usual pleasant chat, making me realise that taking an occasional Uber and tipping generously is actually something I can do for them, I can afford it, and they're really struggling with no-one going anywhere. (It's apparently a bit better since Friday, as the opening up of food deliveries appears to have been leaped upon by a stir-crazy populace and everyone is getting takeout). And, finally, I clambered out of the Uber with my two bags of groceries, and promptly stopped short outside my door to swear heartily because I was fogged up and couldn't see, and my nice neighbour came out to see if he could help, and it transpires he has a battery charger and will cheerfully charge mine for the next time I need to go anywhere. Which won't, mercifully, be for another week or so. Because I'm exhausted.

Gods, but this epidemic thing is weirding to the mental health. I have spent two weeks quite happily noodling around at home, surviving interminable Zoom and Teams meetings (Tracy, I completely agree that Teams is horrible, it's severely clunky and the sound quality is awful), and tempering the faculty's disfunctional flailing by cuddling kitties and prodding my garden and reading fanfic and rediscovering my piano. Then this morning the milk in my tea tasted funny, which is fair given it's five days after its sell-by, so I sallied forth to do a grocery shop.

And that was fine, keeping distance and disinfecting hands a lot, and filling up my trolley with the wherewithal for another two weeks, and then I came to the till, and the nice lady behind her plastic screen apologetically informed me that I couldn't buy the three kinds of plant food in my basket, it was considered non-essential. And I lost it. I managed to tamp down the response to the poor woman, it clearly wasn't her fault, but I loaded the car and drove home in completely irrational tears, shaking and furious.

And that's a weirdly complicated response to a very minor thing in all this. It's clearly demonstrating how close we all are to the edge, how stressful this is, how thin is the veneer of functionality, but I also think it's pushing two very specific buttons for me in particular. One: I have a pathological need to trust the systems I am a part of, and I've generally been OK with how this country is handling things, and feeling to some extent held and protected by the precautions, but this is a completely irrational exclusion, why the hell will they let you buy seeds and bulbs but not the food to feed them? so my faith in the logic and integrity of the system took a knock. And, two: the only thing I can bloody well control in all this is my homespace. I can feed my kitties and sweep my floors and wash my linen and water my considerable container garden and feed it every two weeks, which is starting to really make a difference to its levels of green. And now I can't. I can't control my space, and I can't properly nurture the things which depend on me, and aargh apocalypse it's all falling apart.

So it was a brief storm of disproportionate woe, and was materially assuaged by (a) driving home the very long way round to charge up the car battery a bit, and playing loud Manic Street Preachers at speed on the freeway, and (b) the fortuitous memory that the above grocery expedition had enabled me to take shameless advantage of the supermarket's post-Easter array of discounted Lindt chocolate bunnies. So I'm fine now. But will have to feed leftover orchid food to my non-orchid potplants until lockdown lifts or I can find an evil quisling supermarket which isn't keeping such strict tabs on its product categories. And am making mental notes to be kind to myself, because thin veneer of calm. The chocolate is helping.

Things I Have Discovered This Lockdown: the precise spot in the back courtyard in which to stand if I wish a random photo of same to give the largely erroneous impression of a lushly green English Cottage Garden. The reality is far starker, in that right of frame is up against a south-facing wall which gets absolutely zero sun, so is composed of stark concrete and a few trailing tendrils of Evil Ivy from next door. Also not pictured: the astroturf, the bits eaten by snails, the weird mildew that's ravaged the oreganum, and my slowly-recovering brunfelsia, which is inching back to greenery from almost-white leaves as a result of copious application of plant food. There is also a pleasing foreshortening happening, the reality is not quite as crowded with leaves.

Which I suppose is a long-winded way of saying that pottering around my courtyard at intervals is contributing materially to my sanity under lockdown, and I can completely understand why people in gardenless flats are breaking out into herb-growing and concocting their own sourdough starters. Having living things to prod gently is very celebratory of life and health, both of which appear to be materially under threat just now.

It was all cloudy and cool and vaguely rainy yesterday, which is altogether lovely. Sunday featured extremely high winds and occasional drizzle, causing me to have to bring the chilli bush inside as it was lying horizontal, and also having to re-upright the potted frangipani several times, before finally tucking it around a corner so it stopped blowing over. I think my frangipani's pot is too small, frankly. The plant is particularly designed to catch the wind easily, it's a giant, spindly thing a couple of feet taller than I am, with a dead straight trunk until about head height, at which point it branches into exactly three arms which produce leaves and/or flowers at weird, unpredictable intervals apparently not at all in tune with the actual seasons. Maybe having more room for its feet will help with the strange growth patterns as well as the top-heaviness. An all-container garden does create these little challenges.

The worst of orientation/reg is now over, mercifully, and I am doing that post-frantic thing of realising, the instant the pressure is off, exactly how bloody tired I am. I'm bloody tired. Friday evening was enlivened by a partially tiredness-induced freakout occasioned by an email from the company which is shipping Roxy and Sproing, jo&stv's dog and cat, to New Zealand. Roxy and Sproing are still in CT because of shipping company year-end shenanigans, and have been in the care of house-sitters. Lo these many moons ago I agreed to be an extra contact person to the pet-shipping process if necessary, but for some reason Friday's cheery email was addressed directly to me, and cheerily reminded me of Monday's final vet visit, the culmination of a whole series of vet visits over the last month, of which I was in complete ignorance and which I had not, of course, arranged.

The rational response was, of course, to realise that there's no way jo&stv would have left me to sort it all out without further reminders or contact or, at the very least, giving me the house-sitters' details, but I was tired enough that rationality was not, shall we say, at the fore. Fortunately a few panicky WhatsApp exchanges established that all was well, the vet visits had been arranged by people not actually working 11-hour days, and the address to me was an error. Phew. Because that was a very bad couple of hours.

The reason why it was bad is, of course, because the email prodded, with pin-point accuracy, a particular hangup of mine which is best exemplified in those recurring anxiety dreams I have where there's a huge, complex machine of some sort, performing a vital function, and the whole massive, inexorable thing hinges on me, and only me, having, at some time in the past, pressed a particular button, or done a particular check, or added particular things to the mix, or whatever, and I didn't, and now the whole thing is screwed and it's all my fault. In extreme cases the world ends, or if I move I die, and I promptly move, and die. By this logic, apparently, if I haven't done the vet visits Roxy and Sproing starve in the streets, forever separated from their owners.

I think I need to take some leave, irrational over-reactions are exhausting. On the upside, more rain tomorrow, and I should have a larger pot and enough potting soil to stabilise the frangipani and thus persuade myself that I can take appropriate action when necessary and the world will, in all probability, not end. Or, if it does, that's likely to be coincidental and not actually my fault.

My subject line is from the Fratellis, "Boy Scout to the end", from their album Eyes Wide, Tongue Tied, which, together with In your own sweet time have been playing on rotation in my car, because I'm really enjoying them both. Eyes Wide is strangely Americana-influenced and faintly countryish in tone and image, with a hint of what Jo calls "swamp rock"; Own Sweet Time is retroish and genre-hopping, including moments where I swear they are flat-out channeling the Beatles, but always catchy. I am addicted to Sugartown, which is 60s poppy and ridiculously fun.

Cape Town is having a January heatwave, which I resent somewhat given that it's October. This week has been temperatures in the high 30s, which the weather site assures me is ten degrees higher than the average for this time of year, so thanks, global warming and climate change. I have been sleeping in a mosquito net in sheer self defence. (That is, in a mosquito net and nothing else. The cats appear to be enjoying the additional skin contact, which is hardly helping the problem). The unseasonable temperatures are also stressing my garden-watering schedule something 'orrible, the pots dry out in a day rather than the usual two or three, and as a lone lorne single person I am simply not generating enough grey water to compensate. At this point longer showers may be a moral necessity. (Moral if you're a druid, at any rate. For the purposes of this exercise please assume I'm a druid. The indecent burgeoning of the inhabitants of my container garden over the last few weeks under the aforementioned sunlight suggests that it's not too much of a stretch).

The installation of actual curtain rails in my front windows has been a small but measurable point of mitigation of all this nasty cheap imitation sunshine stuff. (As opposed to real weather, which has clouds and rain in it). Actual curtains rather than those ridiculous blinds noticeably drop the temperatures when you close them to exclude the afternoon sun, which otherwise streams in uninterrupted and with worrying ferocity. My slightly cheap and stop-gap curtains are a pleasing sea-green in colour, rendering my study agreeably underwatery to an extent which is itself cooling to the soul.

I am, needless to say, also retreating into my usual heat-wave remedy, which is to obsessively re-play Skyrim, because snowy landscapes. It is a possibly worrying index of my current state of work-hatred and general misanthropy that I am, in this playthrough, playing dead against my usual type, and following both the Thieves' Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines. I could react against current global moral meltdown by being particularly noble and upright, or I could, apparently, decide that there's no point and in any case I am out of fucks to give. Murder, mayhem and plunder, yay. Why the hell not, everyone else is.

I do, however, shudder to think what actual January is going to give us in the way of temperatures if this is October. Move over, Death Valley. 50s here we come.

It is surprisingly unsurprising to have turned up at Andrew S's "I'm in CT and it's my birthday!" braai yesterday to discover that approximately half the guests, self included, were wearing some iteration of a Star Wars t-shirt. Because old CLAW crowd, and we're all unabashedly geeky and clearly feel enabled in the expression of same by contact with the old tribe. Either that, or it's some sort of territorial display. But I have been reading an awful lot of Teen Wolf fanfic and my view may be unduly coloured by over-exposure to dodgy unscientific pack dynamics. At any rate, very pleasant gathering, and lovely to catch up with people I haven't seen in way too long owing to ingrowing hermitage.

It appears to be spring, which was useful for braai purposes, the weather has been lovely, clear and crisp. CT dams are at 70%, and there's more rain predicted for this week. I am, as usual, consoling myself for the inexorable approach of January heat-waves by wandering around my spring-loaded garden, patting odd exemplars of the burgeoning foliage on the head and exhorting it to further efforts with an insouciant verbosity which I suspect has led my neighbours to mentally categorise me as "crazy cat lady", an appellation which which I am down.

One of the mad floral activists is below, half a tray of violas which I grew from seed. This was the result of a slightly odd supermarket promotion at our local Checkers, where for a couple of months they handed out at the check-out a pile of little seed-growing packs, three or four depending on how much money you spent. These comprised a small cardboard box/pot thingy, a square of paper with embedded seeds, a few labels identifying the particular seed type, and the bit I really loved, a miniature hockey puck of compressed and dehydrated potting soil. When you stuck this in a saucer and added water, it madly expanded and crumbled to make actual soil in a fascinating and semi-magical fashion. In a spirit of experimentation I actually planted one batch of these, despite the fact that I can't grow things from seed worth a damn, and they all sprouted, possibly because Science. The cauliflower and parsley went spindly and leggy and didn't last long, but the violas produced the below, and there's something else quietly growing small, sturdy leaves in the other half of the box, it would be lovely if I could remember what the hell it was. Something floral rather than vegetable. I hope it survives long enough to identify it.

I cannot help but think that it was a slightly misguided promotional concept, to hand out plant-growing kits (a) in the middle of winter, and (b) in the middle of a drought, but the compressed soil was Cool Science, and on the upside, violas! I love their little velvety faces, especially this strain, which have goatees. When I went out into the courtyard this morning they all had their faces turned to the sun, except one, who had it turned backwards in a bit of a sulk. I think the others were mean to him overnight.

My subject line is e e cummings, which is inevitable given spring.

I have not achieved a great deal over my three weeks of leave, mostly downtime and relaxation and recharging the batteries for the orientation/registration onslaught. But in addition to the usual pursuit of gaming (a Morrowind replay, I can't get the hell into the isometric perspective of Divinity) and fan fiction (still Sterek), I have done some desultory sewing, cooking, and gardening. This last started with ruthless rationalisation of my container garden to throw out things that were struggling, uninteresting, extraneous or accidental, the better to concentrate the limited water supplies on the remainder. The Cape Town water crisis is dire.

Once I had slightly over half of my previous pot-herd, I embarked on a programme of repotting, prioritised by a process not unakin to sexing kittens, i.e. you hold them up in the air and scrutinise their nethers for, variously, gender-specific bits or the tell-tale tentacular growth of roots through the drainage holes signifying that their vegetative boots are too tight. Then you find a larger pot, assemble drainage stones for the bottom, wrestle the root-bound offender out of its tight boots, scrabble the drainage stones out from the dense nest of white root-hairs, bung the plant into the new boots, top it up with compost, and water madly from the washing machine grey water, which you have carefully saved after switching to a fiercely biodegradable and probiotic washing liquid.

(Life in Cape Town is a bit complicated at the moment, and entails eco-despair, short showers and herds of assorted buckets in approximately equal quantities.)

Today I reached the final candidate in this re-booting process, which has taken a week because I'm chronically fatigued and have to do this sort of thing in short, carefully-judged bursts, particularly since at least two thirds of the repotting candidates are in fact small trees and require heavy lifting and, in some cases, relocation via pyramid-style ramps. I clearly left it to last because it was the most difficult, being the large, exuberant and tentacular jasmine vine which is inextricably entwined with (a) its pot-planted trellis and (b) the random vertical pipe outside the courtyard door, up which it has twined like both halves of Flanders and Swann's vegetative Romeo and Juliet. I chose, because I'm basically cussed, to try and repot this without trimming it off the trellis or pipe. This already quixotic endeavour was complicated by the following factors:

The fact that the pipe-entwining of the vine necessitated that all loosening activities, including tilting the pot horizontal, took place a metre above the ground (I eventually balanced the damned thing on a stepladder);
The fact that I am a lone single person conducting this unaided, and the pot was slightly too heavy for the average carrying capacity of ~~the African swallow~~ my gammy left elbow so I couldn't actually lift it too far;
The fact that the jasmine's tight boots were so tight, and the tentacular drainage-hole root emergences so exuberant, that it took half an hour of swearing, thumping and prodding with the trowel to loosen it, during which time the philosophy swung sharply from "gently coax with maximum care not to traumatise the plant" to "grab around stem and haul, wrestle and jiggle without restraint, interjecting 'come on you bitch!' at intervals";
The fact that the sweet semi-retired estate agent neighbour was rootling around in his garden over the wall during the entire process and I had to curb the engine of creative swearing which might otherwise have lubricated matters;
Jyn, who persists in the delusion that all gardening activities are designed solely for her entertainment, and who has exhibited a consistent genius for sticking her self and nose into precisely the spot where I'm trying to place a heavy pot. (Jyn's feline operating system is at the very least severely idiosyncratic, if not actually malformed: whoever programmed her seems to have deleted the "Jump" module in order to make space for, apparently, Klingon Eyebrow and Being In The Way).

I have just finished the process, after somewhat over an hour, sore muscles, bruising, some sunburn, being scratched savagely by the lemon tree in passing, and an entirely indecent level of triumph. This was at least a two-person job, and I did it all my own self, muttering "Man is a tool-using animal!" like a litany at intervals. I am choosing to see this as a positive omen for the year, which will present similar levels of disproportionate difficulty and which I hope to bloody-mindedly wrestle into submission in similar fashion. I go back to the work management-meltdown tomorrow, with student protest threats lowering in the offing, and my work inbox is already several hundred emails deep in plaintive student whinges, at least a third of which haven't read the instructions properly. But I vanquished the jasmine! I am mighty! I will prevail!

(My subject line is a quote from the Worms video game, which I never played but whose cutesy cartoon worm dialogue colonised my mid-90s social group somewhat wholesalely, mostly courtesy of bumpycat.)

This is a very lovely city, even when its soft grey misty clouds are a lie and a delusion and only give us a tantalising trickle of the rain we so desperately need. We are on very serious water restrictions, I shower and wash my hands to a complicated system of buckets whose collected water is ruthlessly apportioned to the garden and the loo depending on detergent quantities. The days when I could stand dreamily under the hot water for unspecified aeons while my mind drifts happily, are long gone. I am losing plants in the garden, I don't have enough water for all of them and plants in pots don't have the root access which allows them to survive reduced watering. It's all a bit dire.

My subject line is Kermit the Frog, whose gentle optimism I do not currently feel.

For some bizarre reason my morning Earl Grey tastes faintly of coffee. This seems both unlikely and a little unfair. I don't think there is actually any coffee in the house.

Today is my last day of leave, which I propose to spend doing entirely self-indulgent things which probably include comfort-replaying something hack-and-slashy. It's been a lovely three weeks of leave, which have been characterised by a nice balance of achievement and goofing off.

I examined a PhD thesis, for the first time ever, which was pretty terrifying going in but actually doable, and I think I've done a reasonably fair and conscientious job despite large tracts of it being in an unfamiliar critical field.
I should have written a paper, but three days in I examined my conscience and state of energy, thought "Hell no" and withdrew from the collection, which made me feel guilty for about three seconds, and then enormously relieved; the editor was nice about it and the world did not end. (I also have to say that if there's a silver lining to the student protest cloud, it makes a magnificent excuse for not being able to do stuff).
I finished Portal, Portal 2 and Firewatch, all three of which were highly enjoyable.
I've managed over the holiday period to get back into exercising, which means I've been walking for about 40 mins daily, and am feeling much better for it.
And, notwithstanding water restrictions, I have madly grown a batch of gem squash plants and a mango seedling from seed, by virtue of randomly planting the remnants of various meals, watering them at erratic intervals, standing back and let the currently rather fierce African sun and my predilection for compost do their stuff.

By way of some faint point to this slightly vague and wandering post, have some random linkery.

This is an obituary for Leia Organa, rather nicely done.
This is an Ursula Vernon YA portal fantasy, evincing her characteristic combination of whimsy and down-to-earthness, and featuring a particularly virulent toxic mother figure. I loved it.
This, on the other hand, is an entirely adult, very dark, very freaky, very good Ursula Vernon horror story, finishing which made me go "Holy fuck!" out loud. There's feminist fairy-tale rewrites, and then there's ... this.

My subject line is a random Dirk Gently quote for no reason other than a vague association with multiplicity, and the fact that Tumblr has a current sideline in gifs from the new Dirk Gently tv series. It sounds completely off the wall, has anyone seen it?

So, this is 2017. *looks around vaguely* ... you'd think they'd update the decor. We had the usual lovely New Year's dinner chez jo&stv, with distributed cooking and a metric buttload of champagne, of which I drank very little as apparently I can't drink more than two glasses of anything these days without feeling sick the next day. I made duck. Because duck. I should record for posterity that I made something almost, but not quite, completely unlike the Asian marinade found here - I left out the coffee, added lime juice, and used honey instead of sugar, and the proportions were all different because my invariable principle is not to measure anything and to keep on flinging in bits until it tastes right. But the flavour combination is amazing.

I am still on leave, calloo callay, although it's a slightly hands-on sort of leave. With one hand I am examining a thesis which is forcing me to read more creolisation theory than my non-postcolonial-fondling soul is strictly happy with, sigh, although on the upside it's on Nalo Hopkinson, who is a groovy sf writer. With the other hand I am wrangling orientation leaders, curriculum advisors and random queries from my boss, as I'm apparently constitutionally incapable of going on leave without reading email, and am forced to ritually curse the terminal conscientiousness of my Lawful Good. With my proverbial third hand I am attempting to mend, alter and generally refurbish my wardrobe, and with a fourth hand I am playing Portal, which I had unaccountably neglected to play before despite being absurdly familiar with it via pop cultural osmosis. Dashed through the first one in short order, am nearly finished Portal 2 with enough puzzle-solving panache to have minimal resort to walk-throughs. Both games are elegant, intelligent, darkly funny creations, deservedly classics. I love the goo bits, so creative.

In between all of the above I am lovingly prodding my container garden, which is performing GREEN! with some verve despite water restrictions and the need to amble around with a watering can rather than sloshing about with a hose.

My subject line is a quote from Portal, early GLaDOS, before she gets passive aggressive. She gets quite spectacularly passive aggressive. So far 2017 is off to a reasonable start, but I darkly suspect it's also going to get passive aggressive, and possibly actively homicidal.

For some reason the recent Garden XKCD won't load on my work computer, probably because complicated campus firewalls or something - you go to the page and all it gives you is a revolving tree silhouette with the word "LOADING" and a flashing ellipsis, with the mouseover "Relax." I thought that was the whole strip, and it was perfect - that's exactly what you do with a garden, relax and wait for everything to load.

Currently I am delighting in a random corner of my real-life container garden which is slowly and carefully loading three butternut squash plants, the result of me, in a fit of pique at having an entire tray of baby marrow seedlings eaten off at ground level by cutworm, madly planting 6 seeds from a butternut I happened to have for dinner one evening. I'm fairly useless at seeds, a 50% germination rate is bloody good by my standards, but as long as I can keep the neighbourhood tomcat from jumping on them in the course of his flee-the-garden escape route when I shout at him for stealing my cats' food and/or spraying in the passage, they seem to be doing well. In the meanwhile, the XKCD comic is growing things under lights on my home computer, although I cannot as yet persuade it to produce anything other than a row of identical boring trees. I love the way Randall Munroe's mind works, the controls for the lights are elegantly simple.

In a tangentially related note (technological replications of biological processes?), I give you Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, because delightful. They solemnly and meticulously catalogue the taxonomical classifications of the little plastic widgets used to close bread bags.

In other news also not unentirely related to the unduly artificial mechanical replication of actual life processes, last night Machete Order brought us to re-watch Attack of the Clones. I had honestly forgotten (a) most of the movie, I clearly blanked it in sheer self-defence, and (b) how utterly terrible a film it is. Seriously: the plot sucks, the script blows, the dialogue is beyond lame and unnatural, the greenscreen is ungodly clunky, the "romance" "plot" is the unconvincing bumping together of two wooden effigies, one of them loutish, and the whole represents the utter triumph of overbudgeted CGI over reason, taste or the faintest replication of actual life. Unsurprisingly, given that it focuses on the CGI clashes of droids and clones rather than actual people, the whole thing can be summed up with "Newsflash: I don't care." Honestly, George, it takes a special level of anti-skill to make giant battles between droids, clones and Jedi knights actually boring.

We still have to endure Revenge of the Sith, although probably only when Jo gets back from AfricaBurns. Anyone know any good drinking games? I have time to train my liver up a bit...

Over the last year I have discovered Growing Things From Seed. There's something oddly satisfying and semi-magical about willing a whole, solid, verifiable plant into existence from a tiny, apparently lifeless speck of plant matter. In this particular case it wasn't seed or even bulbs, but rhizomes, which are weird finger-like chunks you plant horizontally without knowing which end will grow. (Teh Internets assured me solemnly that the plant works out which way is up). My three rhizomes grew, as scheduled, flame lilies, which rejoice in the somewhat hyperbolic Latin name gloriosa superba. A flame lily is beautiful and slightly unlikely, and astonishingly flamelike. They're native to Southern Africa, and I cherish memories of them growing wild in the bush near various homes in Zimbabwe. The flowers are very vivid, and in the slight dusk of a wooded area seem to float. I also discover, on growing these particular ones, that they have this particularly elegant adaptation - they're semi-climbing, in that they grow straight up but don't quite stand alone, and the end of every long, narrow leaf has the ability to curl around a thin support and cling to it. I find this enchanting: so economical! none of this messing around with growing separate tendrils.

I wanted to grow flame lilies because I've always loved them and I associate them very strongly with my childhood, but they're also the national flower of Zimbabwe. Before that, they were the national flower of Rhodesia.

I have been a denizen of my pinko-liberal Commie Cherished Institution for nearly three decades now, absorbing postcolonialist rhetoric like an unenlightened sponge, and there is absolutely no way in hell I lament lost Rhodesia in any political sense. It was a deeply illegitimate regime, founded on white privilege, exploitative and dehumanising to its black people, and not nearly as up-front as South Africa about its basic apartheid divides. The fact that the black regime which took over is equally morally bankrupt and just as destructive doesn't mitigate this in the slightest, Two Wrongs maths being what it is.

But it was also my childhood home, and I had a child's essentially innocent experience of it. Flame lilies are an extremely emblematic shorthand not only for the things I loved about Zimbabwe - its landscapes and animals, the ordered and productive agricultural world I grew up in, my family's place in creating that order - but for a sort of naive and nebulous nationalism. I felt, driving down the jacaranda avenue in the capital or having tea in the city's big department store, a subliminal, undefined pride in the country's achievements in civilisation and functionality.

I think it's significant that I grew flame lilies this summer. I was rocked astonishingly hard last year by the Dylann Roof massacre - the American mass shooting where a disgusting little 20-something white boy went into a black church in Charleston and gunned down nine people with hollow-point bullets. Dylann Roof was a white supremacist trying to start a race war. He had a website called The Last Rhodesian, and his jacket displayed both the apartheid South African flag, and that of Rhodesia. I'm slightly more detached from South African apartheid: I arrived in this country shortly before apartheid ended, and in a weird sort of way it was not entirely my guilt to feel. Rhodesia, though - Rhodesia is. Growing flame lilies was, I realise, an unconscious attempt to try and recoup some of my childhood sense of pride, because seeing that Rhodesian flag on Dylann Roof's jacket was a gut-punch, an inexorable reminder that the country I loved was really an illusion, that my experience of it was a cushioned and privileged lie. Rhodesia is now a particularly vile symbol to the kind of bigoted dickhead whose existence I find basically offensive, and in fact it always was. The flame lily was never mine.

It's hard to reconcile. The Rhodesia to which Dylann Roof imagines he belongs doesn't exist, and it would be an ugly thing if it did. But by the same token, my version doesn't exist either. It never did. It was a child's construct, crafted in blindness and complacence. And in innocence, but I'm way too old for innocence. I can grow as many flame lilies as I want, but I can't make them mean what I want them to. What they mean is now infinitely complicated and filled with guilty regret. My subject line is Magnetic Fields, who say accusingly "If you think you can leave the past behind / If you think you can simply press rewind / You must be out of your mind". I'm not sure if they're talking to Dylann Roof, or me.

Today has been characterised by a trickle of emails from students panicking (fairly understandably, I must say) about whether or not exams will run, and what happens if they're delayed. (The VC has just postponed all next week's ones, which will cause interesting degrees of chaos). Campus is still closed and will be tomorrow while protesters lobby Parliament and dodge police brutality, and I predict I'll spend a lot of time for the rest of the week sending soothing responses along the lines of "we know, we're sorry, we're trying to formulate a strategy which won't torpedo your academics." The theme is still anxiety about their studies, just in the microcosm rather than the political macrocosm.

A week at home has, if considered entirely separately from the very real and desperate circumstances of the protests, been lovely. My cats are graciously pleased that I have arranged for once to give them the sustained companionship that is their due, and are signifying their approval by trying to lie all over my papers and wrists and the keyboard while I'm trying to work. While looking deceptively innocent and adorable, viz:

That curled-paw pose is absolutely my favourite one ever. The black speck on his nose is a tiny bald spot which is a legacy of one of his recent fights.

Work itself has also been pleasantly mitigated by the fact that I can wander around the back courtyard during tea-breaks and water, prod, prune and otherwise appreciate all that burgeoning spring life. Because my back courtyard has a statement to make right now, which is "Green!" Or possibly "GREEN!!" Namely:

The small maddened forest to the left of the first picture is three tomato plants, which have confounded my expectations by reaching skyward with jungloid fervour despite the fact that plants put in exactly the same place at exactly the same time last year on exactly the same regimen of soil and water went small and stunted and sickly, and died after producing about one and a half actual tomatoes each. One of the reasons I love gardening is because it has its own wayward vegetable mind and, charm you never so wisely, will thumb its nose and go its own way.

I also, in a spirit of enquiry, planted another batch of Jo's mad rocket seeds, which I swear she has irradiated or subjected to naked full moon dances at midnight. Or else they're actually triffids. Because I planted these on Monday evening, and this was what they looked like this morning:

I went out there a few minutes ago, and I swear they're visibly bigger. The offical, nursery-packaged chive seeds I planted at the same time have yet to materialise.

My subject line is Crosby, Stills and Nash, more specifically "Teach your children well", which I learned to play at guitar club at school, and the attempt to reproduce which this morning led me to realise that I haven't tried to play my guitar in over a year, and its bottom E string has snapped. Phooey. But I'm officially nominating the song as the week's anthem, because dear lord, so much of what these poor kids are facing is simple inheritance.

I have a very simple philosophy about gardens. The top three things required by a garden are:

1. Lots of green.
2. Shade.
3. Scent.

All else is optional. Which makes it a little difficult in my current otherwise much-loved domicile, because it has a back courtyard rather than a garden, all paved except for the middle bit where for no reason known to cultured humanity the landlord has put down astroturf. Astroturf's essentially plastic colour does not, alas, constitute "green" for the purposes of the above algorithm. Any green I achieve has to be imported, in pots. There are also no large trees in the courtyard, which rather puts the kibosh on "shade" - because of the walls and hedge, the courtyard is in deep shade except for the bits in the middle, which are in blinding, unrelieved sun for at least half the day. I do what I can with small trees in pots, but they hardly compensate. And the whole flock of things in pots has to migrate slowly about the courtyard to follow the sun as the seasons change.

I am thus forced to fall back on "scent", which is in early days. I have jasmine, yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, lavender and herbs, which are surprisingly scented if I brush against the burgeoning mint or basil, but nothing really flowered this season. Curses, foiled on all fronts.

"Green" is coming along, though. Even if you ignore the astroturf. Viz:

My subject line is from The Postal Service, since my car sound system has reached the essentially random collection of bands it files under "The", giving me The Postal Service, The Section Quartet and The Shins in quick succession. We appear to have struck a motherlode of wistful indie.

Profile

December 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Modular by branchandroot
Theme: Purple Haze by timeasmymeasure

Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with ineffectual druiding

an inexplicably burning bush, like Moses

you and your arithmetic, you'll probably go far

reconciled among the stars

a million little nights and days go by

Let’s wander, till the fuckers demand an encore

life gives you lemons

DUAL-CRAVING LEMON CHEESECAKE

Day 39: minor terrors and side effects

Day 21: no control

Day 6: vaguely effectual druiding

a hole in my head where the rain gets in

too damned hot

the air of spring smelling of never and forever

viktwee!

visions, but only illusions

a suffusion of yellow

resolute and resourceful in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism

grown inside a plastic box

you want to kindle that old flame

sigh, and know they love you

I'm feeling green

Profile

December 2024

Syndicate

Page Summary

Tags

Style Credit