Tricksters Road

A late-season winter storm is wandering through today, and it’s cold, rainy, windy, and generally being weather to avoid going out in. I’m taking advantage of the chance to make a pot of stew for dinner while I can. There’s some bits of lamb in the chest freezer that needs to be used before it gets freezer-burned (we got some on sale a while back and made several batches of gyro meat from it). I was thinking about baking a loaf of bread, but it’s too chilly in the house for the dough to rise properly, so I have a loaf from the store instead.

I’m worried about the garden beds, since the plants are still very small and we have no way to cover and protect them. If they don’t make it, I’ll have to spend more money and get some already established ones from the local nursery, which I’d rather not do. Money’s already stretched thin enough. Someday I’d love to have a small greenhouse, but that’s a ways down the road. Here’s hoping the plantlings make it through the storm.

A friend is having a mixed artist open studio this weekend over in Newton. I think I’ll try and wander over there tomorrow, after the storm passes, and check it out. Getting out of the house and socializing is probably a good thing to do.

It’s a warm sunny day and the cats and I are enjoying getting to spend time on the porch while we can. There’s a family of chipping sparrows nesting in the yew that hatched babies this morning and there are the tiniest of cheeping noises coming from it. Dad has been spotted a copule of times with mouthfuls of little green caterpillars. The upside to not being able to afford our usual mowing guy is that there’s plenty of food for the birds this year, and there will likely be a billion fireflies in a few weeks.

Yesterday was the grocery run, and I got to have the exciting experience of being trapped in the minivan by a particularly irate hornet in the process. Since it was warm, I’d stopped back at the house to drop off the cat food, rather than have it sit in the hot vehicle while I went to the human grocery store, and it flew behind the driver’s side mirror when I pulled into the driveway. When I got to the store, it came back out and was flying Very Angrily around, meaning that I didn’t dare get out, knowing I’d get stung as soon as I tried. So, I waited. Instead of flying off, though, it went back behind the mirror again. As soon as it came back out and started to repeat it’s angry diving, I pulled out of the spot and relocated to another spot of the parking lot, far away, and hoped it wouldn’t find the new spot. Luckily, it didn’t, and the rest of the trip was uneventful, but it was definitely a bit of an adventure. One less hornet around the house, at least.

GoFundMe is still up. We’re still about a grand short of funding goal, but at least we can cover the first half of the month’s bills, which is a relief. Hopefully we can get the rest before the second half of the month’s bills come due.

The cats have finally woken up from their naps, though, so it’s time for me to wrap up and go back inside to get some chores done.

It hit roughly 100 yesterday. This is not acceptable for mid-May. It’s not acceptable for any time of year, in my opinion, but definitely not in the middle of spring. It’s expected to get up around 90 today and is still over 80 in the house, but because the temperature returns to normal tonight we’re not putting the air conditioners in the windows yet. So, in the meantime, I’m melting.

Here’s hoping that we don’t get thunderstorms like the line that went through last night again, though. The flooding was a lot and I don’t want my barely beginning to appear garden to drown or wash away.

* * * * * *

After weeks of bashing my head against it, I decided to remove the middle section of the video I’m trying to make. It’s just not working, and I can’t get the shots that I want for it, so it’s best to leave it on the proverbial cutting room floor and move on. So now I have to rework that. I was planning on doing the rewrite yesterday but it was so hot that I couldn’t think (and was sticking to the pages/keyboard, which is gross) so now I have to do that today. Hopefully I’ll have better luck. On the upside, I’ve been doing a lot of the planning in my head, and retaining it, so it should go a bit faster.

Speaking of, I should go shower and get on that while I can.

The weather finally cooperated enough for us to be able to set up the raised garden bed frames yesterday. We were only expecting to be able to set up one of them this year due to the currently non-existent budget (side note, we really need to stop using “dirt cheap” to mean inexpensive because let me tell you, dirt is NOT cheap), but happily it turned out that the calculator I used to estimate how many bags of soil would be needed for each one was Very Wrong in our favor. It said nine bags, but it turns out that we only needed four, so we were able to get a second bed set up and split the extra bag between them. Win!

The planting plan for this year was originally going to be just salad greens, scallions, and some herbs (cilantro, thyme, oregano, that sort of thing) that we use a decent amount of, but the addition of the second bed means that I can add peppers, cucumbers, radishes, and broccoli to the menu. Assuming I can even get anything to grow to usefulness. It’s been over 20 years since I was able to have a garden, and have very likely forgotten how to do this. I should probably dig out some books or something.

As I’m going through the process of setting up the beds and getting ready to start planting seeds, I’m once again annoyed by the folks who look at the rising cost of food and cavalierly state that people should just grow their own food. Leaving aside the fact that most people don’t have a place they can use to plant a garden, the cost of setting up a garden is expensive on it’s own.

For us, we happen to have a whole 1/3 acre of land that goes with our house. Of that 1/3, we have roughly 400 square feet that we could potentially use for gardening. Most of that is covered by a giant sheet of buried landscaping fabric left by the previous owners that would either require hiring someone to remove and a metric shitload of new soil brought in or, the option we went with, raised beds and bags of raised bed soil. If we’d removed the fabric, it would have cost between $2-3k at minimum between the removal cost and the new topsoil. Purchased on sale and with assorted membership discounts, the raised beds were $180 for 3 4×4 boxes and $60 for soil ($240 total). If I’d had to pay full price, it would have been around $350. Also, that’s not including the soil for the third bed that we couldn’t afford to get, so if we’d done that it would be around $400.

Note that this does not include seeds or any tools that are needed. Even in raised beds, you still need trowels, rakes, shovels, watering devices. So let’s add an extra $150 for tools and seeds. We’re now up to $550. In my case, we’ve lived here for 7 years, and I’ve amassed the tools over time, so I didn’t have to shell out for them right now. Including a pair of cast iron trellises that a friend had gotten rid of a couple of years ago, one of which is currently home to a black raspberry bramble that volunteered itself next to the house, the other will be home to the cucumbers. The seeds themselves came to around $25.

Please, tell me again how people who are living paycheck to paycheck are supposed to be “just growing their own food”? Like, we technically can’t afford this, either, because home ownership does not mean wealthy, but we were fortunate enough to be able to get some of the supplies discounted and it’ll help save a few dollars down the line. I’ll also note that none of this will do us any good until at least July, which doesn’t do a damned thing for the grocery bill now. Nor does this touch on the fact that I live in a place where we really shouldn’t be planting anything outside for at least a couple more weeks due to frost risks (though we will anyway, since the alternative is not having anything to eat until nearly August), and the growing season ends in September. Or the fact that I’m disabled and that also limits how much I can reasonably manage. I’ll never be able to grow and store enough to free us from the tyranny of grocery stores. Supplemental is all I’ll ever be able to do.

So, yeah…the “just grow your own food” people can bite my ass.

Anyway, rant over. I’ve got to go figure out which of the seeds might stand a chance if I plant them today, or if I should hold off another week just in case. Eventually, there will be fresh chives.

One of the ways you know that your plan to make your small patch of land a safe place for native wildlife is working is when you look out your window and there’s a rabbit lounging alongside the driveway next to your minvan after snacking on violets, while several deer play tag in the side yard.

The yard may not look quite like I originally planned it to be, but at least the wildlife find it safe to hang around in, so I’m calling that a win.

Some time back, I did a series of artwork around strange hooded figures in masks that walked the woods. Apparently, as I crawl my way back to the video format, they have decided to return in stop motion animation, which should be…interesting. There’s a section of poem in the video I’ve been fighting with that announced that it needed to be animated, and thus I’ve been working on making the pieces to film.

I spent today drawing birch trees on slips of paper and fighting with trying to learn Krita to use to remake the Watchers in a mixed media form. I’m tired and grumpy, but the trees are done and the first of the two Watchers, wearing the mask of a barn owl, has been drawn, printed, and cut out. Tomorrow I need to make the fox-masked Watcher and figure out how to make the campfire, and then it will be time to move on to filming.

Gods, that’s going to take forever. It’s only planned to be 3-4 short scenes, but because it’s all stop motion, each scene is going to take at least an hour or so to shoot. I only hope that it will come out looking the way that I’m planning it to be.

Trying not to panic about general life, though. Himself’s UI ran out and the Hall hasn’t been able to send him back out yet, which means that we’re back on SNAP and out of any other cash. I’m also trying to find some kind of courier job or something that I can do that won’t flare up the Long Covid, but with all of the other fuckery going on, I’m not having much luck. Let me tell you, trying to be creative while freaking out about whether or not one will be able to pay any of the upcoming bills is not as easy as it sounds.

Always an adventure, right?

Now, to bed with me. Lots of things to do tomorrow.