Tricksters Road

White rabbits, white rabbits, white rabbits!

It’s September 1st, and the month has begun on the good foot of chilly and rainy, making it the perfect time to dig the lamb chunks leftover from making gyro meat earlier in the year from the chest freezer, brush the dust off the pumpkin-shaped stew pot, and officially launch Stew Season. I even bought a small loaf of bread baked with garlic cloves for the occasion.

This is genuinely my favorite time of year, not just because of Halloween, but all of the harvest-time things, from the spooky to the cozy. I love the ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, and I equally love the endless soups and stews, the apples and pumpkins and the brights oranges and reds of the fallling leaves and apples and….

I wish I could live in the few, fleeting weeks of the year all year round. This is the time of year that the world makes sense to me.

What is your favorite thing about this time of year?

Yesterday I made my first trip to my favorite of the local apple orchards for a small bag of early MacIntosh apples and came home with apples, some late season corn, a bottle of apple soda (actually apple soda, not apple-flavored), and a half dozen cider donuts.

I love this time of year, as the seasons turn from summer to autumn. I’m firmly of the opinion that it should be the harvest season all the time, though I suppose you can’t have the harvest if you don’t have the planting and the growing parts. I love the season of apples and pumpkins, and the way the leaves change from green to bright oranges, reds, yellows, and the rarest of purples. I love the piercing blue that the sky becomes, and the way that the air begins to dry and chill.

Soon it will be time to change the household cooking from the grill to the stew pot, and start baking again. To dig the candles out and see about adding some wood to the pile in preparation for lighting a fire in the fireplace again.

I have so many plans for this season, and I can’t wait.

I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time getting back to writing regularly. It’s not that I don’t want to write, qiute the opposite, in fact. I feel like I’m stuck in power saver mode, though, and don’t know how to get out of it.

We’ve lost both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry in the last 24 hours. It sucks, though in Curry’s case it’s not entirely unexpected. He never recovered from the stroke a few years ago, after all. Still. Ouch. There’s some pretty big holes in the world right now.

Been helping at a friend’s native plant nursery lately, and gods is it nice to work with plants. I wish I could do it more, but the body isn’t what it used to be, and I’m at pretty much my limit on what I can do there. Still, green growing things and a deliciously dilapidated old greenhouse are happy things.

SNAP is going to run out in October or November, depending on what they count as “2 more months” unless I can come up with a miracle. Working on trying to figure out how to come up with the money to pay an accountant to help me set up for freelance work at a time when I can’t afford to buy groceries, because welcome to the hellhole known as the US.

Signed up to do a craft fair with some friends in November, so I’ve got to make several dozen little crocheted toys between now and then. Hopefully I’ll be able to pull in a decent amount of money from that.

Need to figure out how to get myself on a good schedule for making videos. I don’t know why this keeps being so hard to do, either.

Signed up for, and deleted, DoorDash without ever making a single delivery. I kept having panic attacks about it, and that’s a bad sign, so here we are. Not entirely sad about that. The constant fucking emails and phone notifications from the system trying to get me to go out at all hours of the day and night was annoying the shit out of me. Still, it’s one more thing that I apparently can’t do for money, and that list is problematically long.

That’s all for now. Time to go deal with chores.

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.