Climbing Plot Mountain

9:53pm: And the garden year begins
It is raining. This is a good thing - I spent the better part of the day planting things, and a soft, steady rain is exactly what I would have ordered if I'd had that opportunity. But - you had to know there was a but - tonight the moon is full and not only full but also at perigee, the closest it will get all year and consequently observably larger than usual, and I can't see it because of the rain clouds. Frustrating, that.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be clearer. Maybe tomorrow night, if there aren't a lot of clouds, I'll get to see something approximating what I'd have seen tonight.

***

What did we plant? First, eight willow stem cuttings, four each of Salix 'Hill's Black' and Salix schwerinii, which I intend to be the source of raw material for decorative woven fence panels (hurdles, if you want the correct parlance) which I plan to sell once the project gets going. It will make a nice off-season generator of income and, if things do work out, I can plant more. It only takes one growing season for a plant to mature enough to be cut for the rods to be usefully sized - these varieties would grow into small trees if not coppiced.

Then, in the vegetable garden, we planted out the started tomatoes and peppers and some herbs and flowers I bought at last weekend's Maymont Herbs Galore! show. I've been developing a clientele for fresh farm produce amongst my dayjob colleagues, and I plan to can a bunch of the tomatoes since that is one thing we reliably use all year, so I bought and planted a lot: six paste tomatoes (four Jersey Devils and two San Marzanos), eight slicers (four Cherokee Purples, three German Johnsons, and a Tangerine on the recommendation of the organic farm market proprietor who grew them), and three Sungold cherries. I'll be augmenting those few cherries with my own Rose grape tomatoes, which I'd saved seed for two years ago. The Rose seedlings got started rather late, so they're still up by the house, getting babied along.

(Next year, I will start more of my own, even if it means parking outside so I can use the garage, and its electric supply, to set up propagation tables and lights. That will be a heck of a lot cheaper.)

For peppers, this year we planted sweet varieties intended primarily for fresh use (with the remainder to be put in the freezer or perhaps dried; I do have a food dehydrator and should probably experiment some with it): two each of Corno di Toro (a family favorite), Italian Roaster, and Pimento, as well as one each of bell-types Red Beauty and Orange Sun.

Tomorrow, the deer countermeasures go in place, along with cages for the tomatoes and peppers. The rain kept me from dealing with these necessary steps today, but I can't afford to delay. Deer, as I learned last year and much to my surprise, enjoy tomato vines. I'm using sight deterrents ( spinning, flashing CDs tethered to the cages), taste deterrents (a product called Hinder, which is good for both deer and rabbits), and stink deterrents (Lifebuoy soap, suspended inside a rain bell and tethered to the cages like the CDs). I'm also interplanting strongly scented plants which are natural deer deterrents: marigolds, tithonia, onions. I suppose they count as stink deterrents as well, at least from a deer's perspective.

The corn I planted last weekend is beginning to come up! I'm so very excited. Tomorrow, I'll get the winter squash and melons planted in between the blocks of corn, so they can get started deterring things that might like to climb corn.

Yet to be seeded out: cosmos! (If I have a favorite annual flower, it's cosmos, though marigolds come in a close second.) Nicotiana, too, and sweet potatoes, and sunflowers, and pole beans. The flat of marigolds I started at the same time as the Rose tomatoes are doing pretty well, though they're not quite large enough to settle in place in the garden. Another week or two, perhaps. Oh, and zucchini and yellow summer squash and cucumbers.

Then it'll be sit back, and weed and spread straw to deter future weeds and help hold in moisture, and wait for Midsummer's seasonal clues to kick the plants into overdrive. >:-)

***

One of the things I was surprised by this year was that, despite the obvious signs of climate change, the last frost date did not move. I suppose that reflects that frost date is more closely tied to the earth's rotation, rather than surface weather patterns. Food for thought, hmm?

8:34am: The shaming room
Originally posted by cpolk at The shaming room

9:08am: Lies and Damned Lies, Sir
I am so angry I could spit.

Normally I stay away from this topic because it’s such a polarizing, emotional issue for so many people. (And if you don’t want to be enraged, too, don’t read any further.) Today, however, the billboards were back on the sidewalk outside the Virginia General Assembly building, and it was all I could do to walk past them and not rail at the people holding them up.

I’m sure that, no matter where in the US you live, you’ve seen billboards like these. They’re great big plywood-mounted images of fetuses - bloody, sprawled out, graphic as all hell. Deliberately disgusting.

Today, the Virginia General Assembly is set to vote upon a bill which will make those fetuses, and the fertilized eggs from which they sprang, into a fiction of legal personhood. Any intelligent person can do the math here: if a fertilized egg is a legal person, then destroying that fertilized egg is murder. Period. Full stop.

The bill’s author, and his cronies, would like us to believe that the purpose behind the bill is to provide additional penalties should a pregnant woman be involved in a traffic accident through no fault of hers and miscarry as a result. Again, the intelligent person cannot help but laugh at the ludicrous belief that that would be the only time that miserable law would be applied. Do they actually believe we trust them?

I learned a very long time ago that life is not fair. That people can say one thing and do something totally contrary. That politicians will lie. None of that lessens my outrage over the tactics being used in this fight over what should be a personal decision.

Don’t want an abortion? Then don’t have one. And leave me to make my own decisions in peace.

%$#@!%&*^

(Comment if you like, but be advised I have no patience today. Provoke me at your risk.)

12:53pm: Gardening for your health
This - http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/9/8/03-0033_article.htm - is an utterly fascinating article whose premise, ultimately, is Let Them Eat Dirt. As scientific articles go, it’s really very readable, so don’t let the webpage scare you off. Read it to the end, and then take your kids and go out and play in the dirt. It’s good for you.

8:53pm: Mindfulness
You know that Chinese curse about living in interesting times? Well, I just want to know who cursed me. Really, I could take being bored for a week or two. It wouldn't hurt my feelings at all.

(Don't worry; there is no imminent major crisis, just an avalanche of smaller ones. I'm buried.)

***

I hope everyone has been paying mindful attention to the lengthening daylight. We are less than a month past Midwinter, the shortest day of the year, and already the increase in day length is noticeable. It's not quite pitch black when I arrive home after work. I'll take some small reassurance from that, especially when it's as cold as it has been lately.

The chickens are responding to the increase in different ways. I'm getting a steady five eggs a day, six some days. And one of the hens has decided to go broody. Silly bird. No rooster means no chicks. I've been pushing her off the nest, making her go feed and water herself. I suppose that, if I ever did want to hatch out chicks, I now know which hen would volunteer.

***

Thanks to the nose-to-the-grindstone habit required to meet novel_in_90's daily 750-word quota, I've made really significant progress in the novel going under the working title of Switchback. Better, I'm hitting all the marks the three-act structure would tell you need to be in place: first turning point came at 125 pages, and the midpoint finally wrapped up at page 278. (That was one massive scene, and boy, was it the setpiece the books all talk about.) My drafty outline is standing firm--and no one is more surprised about that than me. I am so very much not an outlining kind of writer.

I guess we'll wait and see where the second turning point comes, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

6:02am: The wheel rolls ever onward
This is the thing I want to take forward with me from the previous year's chaos: that there is beauty to be found in the smallest objects around me, and that I have only to open my eyes to see it.

Open your eyes, folks.

3:53pm: Tra la, Tra Blah
My, how time does fly when you’re...well, it’s the run-up to Christmas, so it’s hard to have fun, but there’s certainly enough to get done.

My mother and I have made a pact: only homemade gifts this year. My dad makes awesome fudge. I’ve got the jams I made this fall to distribute. There will be cookies, of course. Probably I should get baking them this weekend....

I mailed one of my gifts already, a packet of seeds of the Cosmos sulphureus I grew in the garden this year to someone who will make good use of them. I notice that the Cosmos seeds on offer in the various catalogs I’ve seen all have the orange and red variants of the plant I’ve grown for years. I’m smugly congratulating myself on having the yellow variant in my plants, as well. This is one I intend to sow in the long meadow for color next year – let’s hope it takes!

***

One of the things consuming my “free” time is the continuing round of novel_in_90. We’re not quite at the halfway point, but I’ve managed to accumulate something over 33K words (by Word’s count, not SMF; I’m at 147 pages SMF, which works out to nearly 37K words). It’s gonna be a drafty draft, with lots of episodes of characters talking to the author, but you can’t edit it if it’s not on the page, right?

So far I’ve managed to be really mean to my characters (where being mean = conflict, which is a good thing). I have a feeling the story is about to become really mean to me, however; there’s an element of magical realism I intend to interject, but I’m not sure why my subconscious, when I was coming up with the idea for the story, decided I had to have this particular element. I still don’t know why. And I’m about to put a character on screen with no idea why she’s there.

I’ve done this novel thing often enough to know not knowing is a really big invitation to lots of rewriting...and I hate rewriting. Under the rules for Nin90, I could just plow ahead and write the parts I do know and worry about this character’s Why later. I am, however and much to my occasional regret, a linear writer, and this will not work.

Maybe it’s a good thing it’s a discovery draft, as well. I’ve got a lot to discover.

***

For those following along on farm news, the egg production is up far enough that I’ve begun letting my former clientele know that I can now begin selling them eggs again. (One of the people who have gotten eggs have not yet used one of the blue ones because they’re so pretty. Awwww....) (Yes, blue. Ameraucana blue. Like these:
)

And I sold my first dozen that very same day. >:-)

9:26am: The marvels of technology, sort of
For any of you wondering just exactly what effect the continuing economic woes and shortfalls in state budgets are having, here’s a data point.

Recently, Gmail upgraded its interface. I’m sure this has a number of benefits. At this point, however, it has been hard to tell, because on my dayjob computer I’ve been reduced to a basic HTML version. Gmail kindly informs me that this is because it no longer supports my antiquated browser – “Upgrade to a modern browser,” it suggests. Heh. I work for the state, people. It’s a given that we’ll be behind technologically.

What am I using on this dayjob computer? Internet Explorer 7, together with Windows XP and Office 2003.

What’s that? Isn’t this 2011? Why, so it is.

You’ll enjoy this, too. We’re going to be getting new computers in December. Those computers will have Windows 7 and Office 2007.

Hey, I’m still gaining four years. >:-)

***

We had an honest-to-goodness snow shower this morning as I was putting the dogs out one last time before coming to work. The way it looks out my window right now, I would not at all be surprised to hear it’s snowing still/again at home. Yay, November! I’m pulling for you, baby.

11:12am: The quiet season
The eggs have begun, six months to the day from hatching to laying. They're coming every other day. After two days of one egg each, we got two eggs yesterday--more than one hen is getting in on the action. Both of them are light-brown, which means it's either the Australorp or the Jersey Giants; eggs from the Ameraucanas ought to be greeny-blue. More interestingly, my mom tells me the earliest eggs ought to be smaller than the hen will eventually settle into. These are nicely medium. I look forward to large brown eggs.

I look forward even more to them learning to lay their eggs in the boxes provided, instead of burrowing them into the bedding straw. >:-)

Coincidentally, yesterday afternoon we ran a power cord out to the chicken house and hooked up a light on a timer. A friend had advised the hens might not have been laying due to the reduced daylight hours. Also, the house is not insulated and, while there's a big window on the south side to let in warmth in the winter, it wouldn't hurt to provide a bit of auxiliary heat in the coldest hours. It will make it easier this winter to feed the hens their daily cracked corn snack, too, if I can see inside the storage part of the henhouse. And, if the extra light works, I should get more eggs, just in time for baking season.

***

Most of the leaves are out of the trees now. The best color of the autumn is done and laying on the ground--those bits which I did not capture and dry and take to work to add to my collage there. The number of comments I get on that collage (leaves dangled by thread from their stems and attached by tape to the upper edge of a lateral drawer on my wall cabinet) continue to surprise me. Such a simple bit of art! It reminds me, though, that interaction is an essential part of enjoyment. The collage wouldn't be half as much fun if it didn't move as you breezed past.

Bright, crisp afternoons and night skies full of woodsmoke and constellations: I do so love the autumn.

***

Garden-wise, things are quiet. The garlic is up and doing well. The spinach and new beets and tatsoi handled the recent freezes well under their little frost blanket, and the radishes are just about ready. The collards are nearly big enough to start harvesting, too, which will please me and the chickens, for whom they're really intended.

We've gotten in one big truckload of screened topsoil and expect a couple of loads of manure (cow and horse) to begin the long process of building up the soil in the garden. We still need to get the area for the greenhouse leveled, and I have to spread all that topsoil and the eventual manure. It'll pay off in a big way in the next couple of years.

***

I'm sticking with the novel_in_90 750-words-a-day plan and hitting the goal most days, except when things are just too crazy at work. I'm up to 7500 words--first draft quality, to be sure, but that's 7500 words I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't committed to the community, and you can't edit what isn't on the page. The rough plot outline format I'm using is working, too, keeping my focus on the direction I want the novel to take. We'll call this cautious optimism and try not to think about it too hard. >;-)

4:22pm: Novel_in_90 Rides Again!
If you, like me, can use the boost to your writing productivity that being accountable to a third party can provide, then here's an opportunity with your name on it. On November 1, LiveJournal community novel_in_90 will be starting up a new round. If you're interested, spin on over there and sign up!

10:36am: Montage
This is the weekend I wait for all year, when the leaves' color shift is balanced between early colors and late, between trees clothed in green and bare branches. How could I resist a camera full of images? (Some of the best are up at my photo blog on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/.) Here's some of that color for those of you who might not have access otherwise. Enjoy!









And one of Kay, because she's such a doll:

9:51am: In which Forward Momentum grinds to a Halt
Seven things you need to know about where my brain has gone, and why it’s unlikely to be more than scatteredly online for the next couple of months:

Toward the end of last month, a coworker passed away. He was young, and it was one of those deaths that could have – oh, should have – been avoided, and he is very, very missed. He was so full of energy and talent. His grasp of technology helped us survive some challenges and avoid some others, and he was one of the best case management backups I have had.

Because of budgetary concerns, there was some sense that Upstairs might drag out the filling of this suddenly vacant position...which would have been an extraordinarily bad thing, given that my other case management backup is retiring at the end of December. I have been contemplating what few means I have of forcing the issue, if it came to that. We got word late last week that we have been given permission to interview to fill both positions. (Which is not the same as actually filling the positions, but it's a step in the right direction.)

That Budgetary Thing. Yeah. After pitching a fit at some members of a national-level survey team here to see where the office could be made to run better, and pitching a second, louder fit at a team from Upstairs detailed to resolve the issues pointed out in the first event, my division finally got some office supplies...like, paper clips. Envelopes. Letterhead, for dog’s sake. (This division is charged with responding to state and federal court orders in habeas corpus and appellate cases, which means we don’t have the luxury of waiting to file something when the supplies come in. The court says we must file something, we must file it. Doesn’t matter if we have to “borrow” supplies from another floor to make that happen.)

The office has finally arranged for a “refreshing” (read as replacement) of our copiers. See above for background on why it’s so essential that our office environment function. You’ll love this one: on the day they took our big copier, the one we use to produce appellate briefs and print PDFs because our 20-year-old HP laser printers simply couldn’t keep up, the new copier crashed twice. The next day, it crashed every other time we tried to use it. I spent half my day unjamming the damned thing. One of the copier company shirts, in the office to supervise training, went so far as to suggest that the problem was that the floor was uneven. He was lucky I had not yet hit enraged and so did not laugh in his face. That afternoon, a tech showed up to install a plate across the faulty hole-punching unit which the company was well aware was faulty (here is where I hit enraged). It was the wrong size. This was Friday afternoon, by the way, which is always an especially busy time for us. He came back, finally, on Monday morning to install the correct plate. As of this writing, one week later, the correct replacement for the faulty part has still not been installed.

The office has also finally been forced to budget for a complete replacement of our office computers. Back in August, I got sucked into an advisory committee to help prioritize our limited budget for the replacement (I’m the lead of the Training subcommittee). The time suck continues. The rollout is scheduled to begin in early November and run through the middle of December, and my subcommittee is tasked with managing the campaign to build a sense of positive urgency in the staff. The novelty for me: we’re moving to Windows 7/Office 2007...which I have never seen, given that my home environment is (quite happily) Mac. My section has several essential pleading formats which must work the first day we have the new software. I have a coworker bringing in a personal laptop today for me to see where the bugs are going to bite.

On the home front, our oldest dog had been on borrowed time for a while due to age and a tumor rising between her shoulder blades. She stopped eating last week. We took her to the vet’s for a final time on Friday. She was seventeen, a very old dog, and will be missed.

My son’s beagle has been to and from the vet’s a couple of times in the past several weeks, too, having either sprained or pinched something in her neck. She’s a very little beagle, and she loves being up on furniture to be closer to the people she loves, which is bad for very little beagles. I, of course, am the designated medication-giver, so I’ve been monitoring her treatment. Unlike the old dog, who bit me when I tried to administer antibiotics to help with a suspected kidney problem, the beagle looooves cheese and doesn’t even care if it comes wrapped around pills. She appears to be on the mend.

The ledger is tilting very decidedly toward the negative side, energy-wise. I’m exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping all that well, both for listening for the old dog when she was still with us and out of a combination of yowly cats, bright moonlight, and earthquake aftershock reactions (we are up over 40).

...and Switchback, the new novel, is still poking at me. >:-) I’m up to ten pages, about 2500 words in SMF (Standard Manuscript Format). I am, scarily enough, making good use of a plotting outline.

So, if you haven’t heard much from me, any of the above is probably why. If sooner has become too much later, raise a flag. I’ll be along.

8:51am: Beginnings and Ends
With Tocara off to my agent, I’m freed to begin working on the next book. I have in mind something involving coal mines and railroads, Serpents and dragons, and the folklore of the southern Appalachians. I have a very tentative outline to help frame the research and an even more uncertain setting: the mining community of Switchback, WV. So: working title, Switchback. I’m sure that will change once I figure out what the story’s really about.

The research itself is off to a good start. I have three books waiting for me via InterLibrary Loan, to be picked up on Friday, and two more on my table at home. All are pretty much cultural grounding; as I told the librarians helping me round the books up, I need to understand what’s already there before I change it. I need to do justice to the stories already on that ground and to the people whose stories they are.

Time to break in a new research notebook.

***

My radish and collard and kale seedlings are coming up very nicely, but something seems to think the beets taste good already. I’ll have to plant more seeds and this time put a barrier up over the seedbed.

The seed garlic arrived in the mail yesterday! I’d ordered from Filaree Farm (http://www.filareefarm.com/) years ago and been very satisfied with the quality of the product. The garden I’d been planting them in finally got too shady, however, and I’ve been resorting to store-bought garlic for the better part of a decade. Now I have space and sunshine, and next year I’ll have my own garlic crop again!

This weekend I have a lot more planting in mind. Beets, maybe carrots, the garlic. Prep for the new raspberry bushes my dad will be bringing our way in October. Spinach, as much as I can fit in the two rows which are not going to be reworked this fall. Up by the house, I have mint in pots which need to be sunk into the ground, pots and all, so I don’t have to worry about them this winter (or water them next year).

***

I got the most lovely surprise harvest this week: braconid wasp cocoons on three of the massive tomato/tobacco hornworms I’ve been noticing lately on my tomatoes! Take that, Monsanto; I don’t need your help eliminating pests in my garden. The cosmos planted in the garden and the wild Queen Anne’s Lace at the wood’s edges have done their work, drawing and feeding the adult wasps which parasitize the hornworms. Next year, there will be more hornworms...and even more wasps. Huzzah!

(This is a great site talking about the war between worm and wasp: http://www.gardengrapevine.com/TomatoWorm.html. Great photos.)

3:19pm: What the heck do I do now?
At (very) long last, I have wrapped edits on Tocara. It’s been an extremely long slog through this rewriting pass, working in suggestions made by several very helpful critters and working around two household relocations, selling one house, and buying another. If I haven’t screwed it up, I think it is a pretty good story.

We will see if La Agent thinks so, too. >:-) (She probably thinks I’ve fallen off the face of the planet. Sorry for the awful delay, Shana.)

One of the hardest things for me has always been striking a balance between boring the reader with too much detail and frustrating the reader with too little. I am trying very hard to move my pointer on that spectrum a bit closer to the “more detail” end of things. An early editing draft bore the moniker “Obvious!” as a reminder that what is transparent to me is opaque to others. Here’s hoping I’ve managed at least an incremental improvement.

***

What’s the story about, you say? It’s a secret history about the magic, and power, of belief. It’s set in Spanish Colonial Florida and Havana, and involves a stolen bell, and hostile Indians, and empire-building Spanish dons.

I should probably work up a good logline now that it looks like I might get to use it.

Best yet, from this point forward I get to spend time with the next novel without feeling guilty!

***

At the farm, there are no eggs yet. No worries; four months of age (18 weeks) is the low end of when hens usually begin to lay. I have seen indications that the hens have been investigating the nesting boxes. They’re all roosting at night now, which is good, as the overnight temperatures have begun to drop. Some day soon, there will be eggs.

There are some consolations. The pole beans have begun to fruit – after being blown over, restaked, staked again, staked again.... The weather after the hurricane blew through (hi, Irene; bye, Irene) was gorgeous and cool, so I went out that Sunday afternoon and turned and smoothed out enough of one of the empty garden rows to get some of the fall seeds in. I’m trying a couple of different kinds of radishes and some Harrier beets. I got some collards and Laciniato kale in, too.

The meadow portion of the long field in the back is gorgeous with black-eyed susans and ox-eye daisy and redtop meadow grass. The sumacs and the black gums have begun to show a hint of the scarlet color they’ll develop as September heads toward October and the cool evenings turn cold. Somewhere in there, we’ll run the bushhog over the meadow one final time for the year and neaten everything up for the winter.

We’ll be harvesting sweet potatoes inside of a month. Can’t wait to see what we end up with – we know the soil in this former forested field was not the richest it might have been, so I will be satisfied if we get a decent three or four potatoes from each of the vines, but I am hoping for enough to share (and sell – the microfarming venture has nearly recouped enough in sales to have paid for the plants we bought at the outset).

Plans are being made to bring in a big truckload of sifted topsoil, the good stuff, and a couple more pickup truck loads of horse manure to be sheet composted over the winter and turned under again in the spring, together with the straw that will be protecting it all from the weather.

I’m already salivating over plans for next year. >:-)

***

The earthquakes have not stopped. I thought for a couple of days they’d slacked off – and then we got hit with another whopper, 3.4, enough that the beagle hightailed it down from my son’s bed and into ours and Kay, my dog, all but crawled into the shower with me. I am so very fed up with random shaking. My nerves jangle for an entire day after one of those.

Enough!

9:25am: Shake, Rattle and Roll
4.5. 3.4. 5.9. They’re all numbers, except when they relate to things falling off your shelves and dogs climbing up under your covers to shiver and shake while you fail to get back to sleep. I realized today, after I had to consciously restrain myself from saying something harsh to the Chatty Cathy who invariably sits alongside me on the bus and just will not shut up, that I am tired and stressed and have had entirely enough of talking about earthquakes.

(Please do not ask me if I felt the latest aftershock. The epicenters have varied, but they’re all less than ten miles from my house and some are much closer. We have felt every one. If you persist in asking me if I felt it, I may take your face off.)

For the record, we had minor damage to objects in the house and cosmetic damage around the foundation, but all the living creatures are fine and we have been lucky. Neighbors lost a whole lot more. These old houses around here, so many of them brick, are not engineered to take stresses like this.

And neither, clearly, am I.

***

It’s nearly egg time. I’ve been checking the nesting boxes each evening to see if the silly chickens have grown up enough to begin laying. Thus far, the only thing in there is the golf ball I tucked into the straw to give the hens ideas.

The little gold hen appears to be healing well from whatever she did to herself. She’s taken to isolating herself in the coop while her comrades poke around in the yard, so I put a chick waterer in there and have been taking her the occasional goodie and making sure some of the leftovers tossed into the yard for fowl delectation end up close to the door into the coop. The silly bird appears to have decided I’m not going to eat her after all (none of these birds were very well socialized as chicks, and they won’t let you come near them). She’ll come out into the yard when I go in there and stands nearby, looking up at me as if asking if she can come roost on my hand. Given that I’ve had to carry her outside a couple of times when she was really gimpy, I suppose her expectation is not surprising...but it is, because this is a chicken, not a pet. Silly bird.

***

The watermelons this year were awesome. We just picked the last one in anticipation of being awash in Hurricane Irene. The vines have suddenly decided they need to pop out more fruit, so we have teensy little melons on there now. I can’t imagine they’ll mature before frost, but we’ll see. If not, the chickens will be happy to have them.

I can’t wait for the seed catalogs. I already have visions of sugar plums. *g*

8:29am: Cooler, with a chance of baking
We caught the edge of a thunderstorm last night and, as a result, this morning is about ten degrees cooler than it's been most of the rest of the week (that is, 72 instead of 80). It'll get awful again in a bit, as soon as the sun comes up above the trees, so I'm taking the opportunity to bake up a squash casserole.

One of my books calls zucchini "tiresomely productive" - I have never heard a more accurate description. >:-) Just as it starts to get really hot in the afternoons, the zucchini begins to pop fruit left and right. If you don't keep up with it, you'll very quickly end up with a dead plant surrounded by a bunch of baseball bats. Of course, the plants are usually short-lived anyway, thanks to the bugs, but while they're healthy you have to pick them every day. Which means you pretty much end up with a fridge full of zucchini!

This casserole is a great way to use up some of that excess. It's my mom's recipe, and the one my son insists I use. Feel free to substitute any portion of the zucchini with yellow crookneck (or straight neck) or any other summer squash overflowing your kitchen.

Squash casserole

4 Cups summer squash, chopped, steamed and drained
3 eggs, beaten
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 Cup butter, divided
2 1/2 Cups saltine cracker crumbs, divided
1 1/2 Cups shredded cheddar cheese

Preheat your oven to 375F. Grease a three quart casserole dish.

While the squash is steaming, crush the crackers into crumbs (I use a zip bag and my rolling pin) and chop the onion. In a large bowl, combine 1 cup cracker crumbs, the onion, 2 1/2 Tablespoons of butter cut into smaller pieces, and salt and pepper to taste. Beat the eggs in a small bowl. Drain the squash and put them in the bowl with the onion mixture. Stir it around to cool it off a little bit, then add the eggs and mix thoroughly.

Melt the remaining butter in the microwave (should take about 15 seconds; make sure you keep a paper towel across the mouth of your container in case it spatters). Pour the butter into the remaining cracker crumbs in their separate bowl and mix to distribute.

Spoon about a third of the squash mix into the greased casserole dish. Sprinkle the surface of the layer of squash with a thin layer of cheese. Repeat with a second and third set of layers until all squash and cheese is used up. Top with the reserved crumb-butter mixture.

Bake until firm and browned, about 30 minutes.

***

The worst part about heat like this is that it makes it hard to want to be in the garden, or to go outside at all, and so you miss amazing sights like the sulphureous explosion of cosmos, or the way the borage flowers look like stained glass against the sky, or the dragonflies dangling from the Queen Anne's lace.

Go out. Seize the next cool morning and walk. You won't be sorry - probably in need of a shower, but not sorry.

***

On the writing front, I'm in the third act in the Bells novel - oh, let's start calling it by its current name. Maybe then it'll stick. Allow me to present to you Tocara, Cantara, Lloré.

...in the third act of Tocara, having finally made it out of the rewrite of the dreaded middle. Changes in the second act are having their expected ripple effect here. I poked and poked at the opening passage, dissatisfied with the emotional resonances, and after a lot of work I got what I think is a pretty damned satisfying scene.

(I'd share, but it's full of spoilers. Sorry.)

I like this book again. Here's to hoping I can sustain that.

2:46pm: Back from three days in Lynchburg VA for a garden tour - as is our apparent curse, we brought record heat and humidity with us, which promptly broke not half an hour after the tour concluded. The couple of days afterward have been a real joy, however, our reward for enduring. I've got a few photos up on my Flickr page (here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/).

I can tell the point at which the heat got to me. The photo shooting really tails off. >:-)

How hot was it? These guys can tell you:




Arriving back home, I discovered this:



Baaaaaaby watermelon! As with the zucchini, the plants apparently have reached their magic tipping point and are popping out tiny watermelons left and right. The vines are getting so long I'm having to wind them back on themselves so they don't get stepped on in between the rows.

6:26am: A corner for one, please
Jim Hines is being smart (again) over here: http://jimhines.livejournal.com/585381.html. I, too, am a classic introvert. I've tried attending conventions of varying sizes, from WorldCon to World Fantasy Con to Fourth Street. I may yet go back to a convention, but right now, that is not a goal. And, as Jim says, that's just fine. It's the way I, and others like me, are wired. It's not that I'm shy (and there's a nice discussion topic: what's the difference between shy and introverted? I certainly believe there is one.); I have on plenty of occasions participated, and enjoyed, gatherings. I do presentations for my job in front of varying numbers of people and have always succeeded (and been asked back >:-) ) . But noise and movement and large numbers of people leave me exhausted. So, if you remember me running away at any of the aforementioned cons, that's why. And if you see me huddled in a corner at some future event, trying not to look like a panicked animal, I invite you to come huddle with me. Corners are where it's at, baby.

1:32pm: Because there's Always Something
Here at Always Something Farm, we have settled into our typical mid-summer pattern: a little bit of activity in the early morning hours, before the sun rises and turns the air into a sauna, then seeking of shady nooks to await the cooler evening. Fortunately, there is a lot of shade up by the house. The heat hasn't yet reached unbearable.

This morning, we woke to grumbles of thunder in the distance. (Of course, Kay knew about it long before we did. I'm surprised she didn't end up in the bed.) Before too much longer - just after I got up and went to cover the grill, which I'd forgotten about the night before - we had the nice, steady rain we all hope for. Well, this time of year we both hope for and hate that rain; the garden needs the moisture, but the humidity levels don't need the help.

The zucchini have been laughing at me for the past two months - either that, or they wanted the humidity, because it was only this week that we finally got female flowers on the damned plants. Everyone I know is already eating their zucchini. I've been going down in the mornings, before the heat, and peeking under the leaves, hoping to find a female flower coming along. Today my threadbare patience was rewarded with quite a fair number of them, so by this time next week we should be very well supplied in the zucchini department.

(Don't know how to tell male and female flowers apart on squash? Here's a good shot that should help. Skinny stems are males; female flowers already have the baby squash waiting for pollination at their base. There are two female flowers in the lower right-hand corner. I think the rest are male.)



The garden isn't the only part of the farm that's busy being productive. The fungi crop was especially beautiful after this morning's rain. The one big Ailanthus tree back in the berm beside the long field thought it was going to have a good year, too, but it reckoned without me. The tree's in chunks on the brush pile, and photos of the seed pods (the reason the damned tree is so prolific, and so invasive), the fungi, and a lot of other new stuff are up on my Flickr photo blog, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/ I'm especially pleased with the Cosmos, for which I save seed every year; they really are as brilliant as that photo shows.

***

Public service announcement: watch out for ticks this summer! Apparently the diagnosis of Lyme disease is way up. The spring's moist weather in the eastern half of the country provided ideal conditions for the little bastards. Lyme is nothing to screw around with; it's far, far more (and worse) than a rash.

Interestingly, it looks like invasive plants might play a role in the increase in Lyme cases. There's some well-documented research being done in Connecticut which shows a correlation between stands of escaped Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) and the numbers of Lyme-carrying ticks. Eradication of the barberry thickets (via propane torch, since just cutting them to the ground means they resprout with a vengeance) has gone a long way to reduce tick numbers. Lessons learned: watch out what you introduce into your ecosystem, and control it if it escapes. You never know which pretty little foreigner will end up going Godzilla.

2:00pm: Organic garden fertilizer
Posted here so I can't misplace my notes. (Have you seen my desk?)

From the recipe offered by Steve Solomon in the June/July 2006 Mother Earth News [http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2006-06-01/A-Better-Way-to-Fertilize-Your-Garden.aspx].

4 parts seed meal
1/4 part agricultural lime (powder)
1/4 part gypsum (or double the agricultural lime)
1/2 part dolomitic lime
1 part bone meal, rock phosphate, or high-phosphate guano
1/2-1 part kelp meal

Put on your dust mask and mix the ingredients together. Store dry. In spring, before crops are planted, spread four quarts of this mix per 100 ft of garden row. In addition, spread a 1/4 inch layer of finished compost or composted manure. Work into the soil.

After 3-4 weeks, reapply a thin layer of the fertilizer across the root zone of heavy feeders. Repeat until the plants no longer respond to each application with increased growth.

2:17pm: The Chickens have Landed!
Six little cheepers now occupy the chicken house - one Australorp (black, as they all are), one black and one splash Jersey Giant, two silver Ameraucanas, and one wheaten Ameraucana. They're about four weeks old, so it will be a good long while before they begin giving us eggs, but it's nice to have one more step taken along the road to actually having the small farm we'd envisioned.

(A decent pair of shots of the babies: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/)

Also accomplished: irrigation of a sort for the vegetable garden. After a good bit of trial and error (and three trips to Lowe's for more parts), we rigged up a 300-foot line from the tap in the front of the house to the bottom of the garden. Every other garden bed has its own spigot along that line. We'll put the system to work this afternoon, once the sun goes down a bit.

We had our first deer damage on Friday night; an entire row of tomato plants lost their tops. Saturday, all the tomatoes were promptly encased in deer fence, and the sweet potatoes (White Yam slips planted Wednesday evening) have a deer fence drape, too. Surprisingly, the deer have not yet bothered the beans. I thought deer liked beans!

The strawberry plants transplanted earlier this spring from TN have flowers, silly things. We may yet have fruit this year. The raspberries, newly transplanted, are pouting but should do fine once they settle down.

(We've already had wild strawberries - the ones I managed to get to before Kay did! - and will shortly begin enjoying the wild blueberries. Yum!)

***

On the writing front, I'm working my way through the second of third parts of the Bells novel, in what I kid myself will be a final pass before sending it off to my agent. I have another story nibbling away at my attention, which is nice in more ways than one; I haven't had the mental energy to generate new story ideas since February of 2010. The new characters' insistence on telling me about themselves is proof that my poor brain is recovering from the overload.

***

In hyperlocal news, it's hot and humid. Memorial Day weekend is a reminder of what this time of year means in central Virginia. Also, poison ivy is no fun.

::itches::

2:01pm: The 51.86-point Buck, er, Weed
Now here's a competition I can get behind: trophy weeding! Tired of all that good ole boy bragging about the ten point buck your neighbor shot last November? Use the calculations at Garden Rant (http://www.gardenrant.com/my_weblog/2011/05/trophy-weeding.html) to claim some bragging rights for yourself.

(What was my trophy weed, at least thus far in the growing season? Another damned oak seedling, sprouted from the multitude of fertile acorns strewn across my back yard. I used to have a dog that thought the seed balls from the sweet gum tree (Liquidambar sp.) were tasty treats and so had few gum tree sprouts in my back yard. The new yard, and the current dogs, don't seem to consider acorns akin to popcorn, which is really too bad considering the number of mature oaks on the property.)

***

No chickens yet. The house was not ready, so we postponed. Maybe in another week, maybe two, when the bitty chicks are old enough not to need heat - our chicken house is at some distance from the people house and does not have electricity. It does, however, have trim work around (now properly hardware cloth-screened) windows and doors, and a chicken door into the run that is both operable from outside and latchable, and a feeder indoors that can be height-adjusted from the storage portion of the house (so as not to disturb the birds). On Wednesday, we'll have the stone to finish off the lower portion of the wire protecting the run, and then the house and run will be ready for occupation.

Yeah, yeah. I'll have those new photos up some year.

***

The tomato plants are blooming, despite relatively cool overnight temperatures (48 this morning before the sun started to warm things up). None of the bush bean seeds have thus far sprouted; I'm hedging my bets with pole bean seeds planted in between each of the bush bean hills.

The one surviving thornless blackberry plant I brought with me from in town is installed in its row (with a slight haircut; P did not realize it wasn't a weed to be mowed). It'll throw out great arching canes this season, which will be pegged out to produce additional plants and thus populate the row. Thank dog this variety is thornless - it's incredibly prolific.

The raspberry sticks purchased at Lowe's are still sticks and have been evicted for lack of viability (no buds in two weeks; no life in the poor things, which clearly were allowed to dry out in the store). My mom and dad are sending replacements from their raspberry patch. I suppose I'll buy my son, whose project these are, some thorn gloves now as an early birthday present. *g*

4:29pm: Again with the Updatery
The chicken house is finished! Well, next to finished. Roof’s on, windows and doors are in place (lacking only the exterior flap on the chicken hatch into the run), wire’s up on the inside and the interior furniture’s in place as well.

(You’d call your bed and chairs furniture, right? So, chickens have furniture, otherwise known as nesting boxes and roosts. >:-) )

We also got the fence poles in for the run and stretched out the wire to fence that in. Hopefully it’ll all be done by the time we collapse tonight. Chicken D-Day is Saturday.

(Some photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/. Many are from our trip to Cheekwood Botanical Garden in Nashville a couple of weeks ago. I still need to download more snaps taken since then – you know, in my copious spare time.)

The veggies are in for the most part. As one might anticipate, I bought way more tomato plants than we actually needed, but selection was so weird at the nursery where we got our plants – singles of some plants, four packs of others. I could have gone to the local herb show, where I would have found a much better selection, but that was clear across town on a day when I was already swamped with things to do (see above re chicken house). Hopefully the varieties I ended up with will be worthwhile.

One of the beds is mostly filled with strawberry plants we brought back from my parents’ farm in Tennessee. They’re perking back up, poor things, and have new leaves, so I think the transplanting has thus far been a success. They’ll eventually be moved to permanent beds to one side of the vegetable area - a project for the autumn.

I still need to put in the winter squash seeds (couldn’t find starts) and wait for the sweet potato slips to arrive before tucking them in. All in all, though, the garden’s in.

***

I do not like these new glasses. Or maybe it’s my aging eyes. Either way, I do not like not being able to see up close.

Sure, yes, I could have gotten bifocals and had a stronger, up-close prescription put in there, but I do not like bifocals. I don’t like giving up part of my regular reading area to something I don’t always use. I’ll stick with single vision for as long as I can.

***

The other project that’s been completed this week is a pair of large gates for the end of the dog yard, both to give access to the area beyond the fence where I’m going to put up a clothesline and to ensure vehicular access to the dog yard, where our well is located.

The clothesline poles came in the mail, too – in the mail, because no one local carries them. I ordered wires for the lines, as well, and those should be here this weekend or early next week.

***

The satellite dish, and its reception of local channels, is giving us fits. A technician came today and told us that one of the trees in the front yard was blocking the signal for the local channels, which are carried on a different satellite signal than the rest of the channels. Bah. The suggestions we were given were to top the tree or remove it. Double bah! What happens when the rest of those trees out there grow more? I’m not wrecking my trees one after another.

***

Good things? The woods and grounds around the house are a haze of green that looks too bright to be real. Turkeys keep calling in the bottom land behind our property, and there’s a whipporwill in the woods and frogs out there somewhere, too.

I have located not just one but four Carpinus trees on the property. You may know this plant better as Ironwood, a muscular-trunked tree with small, serrated leaves and, in the spring, tiny catkins that dangle below the barely opened buds. The forms taken by the trunks are a wonder. There’s probably a hazel, too, but the deer grazed it back to twigs just after I noticed it, so I’m not really sure where it is along the road frontage. It’s been exciting watching the trees and shrubs resolve into blackhaw viburnum (I think), black gum (ditto), maples and beech – oh, the beech trees! There’s blue-eyed grass all over the fields.

The deer have thus far let the new vegetables alone. Hopefully letting Kay roam around down there in the afternoons is keeping her scent strong enough to discourage exploration...either that, or they don’t like tomatoes!

4:33pm: ::thud::
Ever want a personal demonstration of inertia? Try drafting a blog post after not posting for six weeks. (ETA: eight weeks!)

My absence has been compensation for an overwhelming personal calendar – not compensation I intended to make, and my inability to blog was not the only thing that got set aside. In short, too many effing things to get done, not enough hours in which to do them (or, as it turned out, even to remember to do them).

I’m still experiencing a lot of preoccupation; the to-do list whose existence is making this blog post possible has not really gotten a lot shorter. Nevertheless, I am making progress. Some of the chaos is getting resolved. Structures are being built...literally, in some cases. *g*

(Chicken house, photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8556491@N07/)


***

I am a little less than a third of the way through the thematic rewrite pass on the Bells novel. I got that far on the back of a synopsis which was specifically written to highlight theme and thematic elements; without that synopsis, I’d never have been able to hold the entire story in my head, not in the reduced headspace I’m working with. Bill Johnson’s how-to for synopses is awesome (and publicly available; if you can’t find it, please let me know and I’ll send you a copy).

***

On NPR this morning they said that the discretionary spending portion of the budget that the US Congress is faffing around with equals no more than 12 per cent of the entire budget. That means that 88 per cent is considered untouchable (at least currently, and that depends on who you ask). What’s in that 88 per cent? Military spending. Medicare.

Remember, the next time you hear some overpaid, ego-inflated Congressional talking head insisting on how essential it is that he holds the line on spending etc., that he’s thrashing around about twelve per cent of our nation’s enormous budgetary outlay. Want to get under his skin? Ask him when the other 88 per cent will be considered for cutting.

(No, I’m not in favor of slashing military spending, or of slashing any particular program. I’m in favor of honest compromise. You know, where we know we’ve done a good job when both sides hate the result?)

I made my annual contribution to my local public radio station today. It’s reporting like this – honest, insightful, giving the listener the real big picture behind the public media portrayal of issues – that I value, and I hope every one of you who want truth, not more padded lies, contributes what mite you may have to supporting public media like NPR. You know, the public media that Congress insists the government should no longer be funding.

4:30pm: Research roundup, and cultural conundrum
Here’s a question that’s been pinging around in the back rooms of my brain for a while: historically, what sociological/cultural factors have led to cultural groups using matrilineal descent? So many societies mark descent through the father’s bloodlines. What factors predispose, or cause, a culture to use the mother’s bloodlines instead?

This question brought to you by worldbuilding for the next novel. It’s all well and good to aim for a fresh take on culture, but to my mind there needs to be a reason for cultural behavior. I’m not happy with just deciding city-state AAA tracks its lineages using matrilineal descent; I want to know why, and what else is likely influenced by the condition that creates matrilineal descent.

(Why, yes, my real interest in college was sociology. However did you guess?)

In order to properly subvert something, you have to know its boundaries. At the moment, it’s just idle curiosity, but you never know. It’s a big continent my characters are exploring. The trick in developing a fictional world, for me at least, is in knowing the depth to which that worldbuilding needs to go...and the point at which I’m wasting my very limited time.

If you have a speculation on the above question, please do feel free to offer it.

***

Otherwise, I’m doing more research, this time on Havana in the 1720s. I have not quite located source material for that period, but I’ve gotten close (the early 1600s for the book I’m currently taking notes from). Every time I go through one of these research periods, I bless the authors who provide good bibliographies; they’re more likely to know which books have been published on, say, the street layout of Havana and the location of the governor’s residence, and their lists of references have given me ideas more than once.

At the moment, I’m regretting my written Spanish is not better. I bet I could get a lot closer than I’ve gotten to my chosen time period if I could read the original source material.

And, really, I am grateful I’ve even gotten as close as I have. It’s not like it’s a popular subject, and the Castro regime’s isolation has not made exploration of the history of that island any easier. The winners write the history. It does not surprise me that what little I can find on the ‘net is all post-Castro.

Tangentially, I have acquired a couple of photo-rich books of the furnishings of historic Cuban houses and other structures. Gorgeous is the most accurate word I can use. Gorgeous, and how the hell did any of this survive when the buildings themselves, even in Havana, look like collapsing wrecks?