October | 2018 | Does This Font Make Me Look Fat?
It is 55 degrees outside this morning and the furnace is running. Just a couple of dasy ago it was in the mid 80’s. I think fall is finally here although we are still waiting for the trees to show color.
Today there are five photos from my garden and one from Friday’s tour of a nearby commercial cucumber farm.
I thought we would have to hire a crew of studly men to move the Jan Kirsh avocado sculpture, but my husband and I accomplished the feat in forty-five minutes with a mover’s dolly. I had been watching the track of Hurricane Michael and knew that if we got significant rain it would be weeks or months until we had an opportunity to move this heavy concrete sculpture. When it was installed the artist brought a crew of three men. Kirsh now makes these avocados out of resin so they are not so heavy. On the left, still wrapped for winter is the avocado sitting in the mud last May. On the right is the new location.
We’d originally installed it in the garden with the best view from the deck. But that is the garden that is increasingly full of water after heavy rains. And eight years later the sculpture had subsided and the red twig dogwood I planted as a backdrop had encroached. It needed to be moved.
I thought I knew where I wanted it to go, but after removing the river birch several weeks ago that open spot seemed perfect. It is a little higher and doesn’t stay soggy. The spot was thirty feet from where the sculpture had been placed and I was resigned to paying a crew to move it.
However, my mind is always in problem solving mode. I realized if we could get the avocado off the base and on to a mover’s dolly we might be able to pull it across the lawn. And on Tuesday morning we had a window. We’d had no rain for a week. The main piece of sculpture was gently rocked off the base onto a bag of unopened potting soil. We didn’t want to break it. We then moved the base and the large piece of bluestone the sculpture sat on to the new location. The avocado was trickier since it had one end that was heavier than the other. We padded the dolly, and levered the avocado on. My husband pulled and I steadied. And we were able to reasemble it in the new location. Yay for septuagenarians!
2. The heavy rains on Thursday night, the remnants of Hurricane Michael, filled the avocado. Before we have freezing temperatures I’ll need to empty it and wrap it for winter. The rain and wind brought down alot of branches from the silver maples. Lawn clean-up is in my future.
3. I went out on Wednesday to take some photos before the predicted rain and saw at least six Monarch butterflies. They liked the remaining zinnias.
4. Monarchs liked the tall asters, too.
5. A post-it note on a kitchen cupboard had been reminding me of a garden task. I wanted to put some small ferns in the area where the Naked Lady lilies come up so I would remember where they are. I’d flagged the area when the foliage died down and finally got the ferns planted. I managed to damage some bulbs in the process. Oh, well. I don’t know where these ferns came from but they handle quite a bit of sun, don’t get too tall, but spread nicely.
6. On Friday I traveled with a garden group to see a local cucumber farming operation which has two enormous greenhouses where they grow seedless English cucumbers. The flowers don’t need to be fertilized to produce fruit. The greenhouses were previously used to grow cut flowers but when the recession hit, people stopped buying cut flowers and the farmers had to find a new crop. These long cukes have very fragile skin and must be hand picked as do the grapes on another part of this farm. Commercial farming is hard work and expensive. This greenhouse is on a farm which has been in the same family for five generations.
Today was the one day this week I had blocked out to work on the revision of my novel. All day! Other days had room for an hour here, an hour there. Today was all day with the exception of an hour to go to a WW meeting and the grocery store.
The writing Gods did not cooperate, but it’s my fault.
I knew I had a blog for The Santa Diaries. I just couldn’t find it. I hadn’t posted on it last year because there was no new production in 2017. Had it gotten archived or something? So I started a new blog using the same URL. And then pointed the URL to the new WordPress blog. Big mistake. Now I had two blogs with the same URL and I only wanted the one pictured above. It has all the blog posts about previous productions of the play.
In the middle of last night I woke up and realized that I had a bunch of Rolodex cards clipped together for my WordPress accounts. And there was one for The Santa Diaries Project. Somehow this blog was opened with a different username and password than the account that holds my other blogs which was why I couldn’t find it.
I spent the morning on WordPress Chat with their Happiness Engineers. From around 9 a.m. to quarter to 11. First it took a long time for someone to respond to me. Then partway through the Chat I lost the page that had the Chat on it. That happened twice. At least the new helpers could read the thread, but they couldn’t find the original blog for The Santa Diaries Project. Could I send them a screenshot? Okay, I took a screenshot of the original blog but it wouldn’t load on the Chat function. I was instructed to turn it into a jpg. At that point it was time for me to leave the house for my WW meeting, so I told Denys, who was helping me, that I would try again later.
There is now a fork in the road. Continue to pursue fixing my WordPress mess or work on the novel revisions. Tomorrow and Friday are filled with away from the house appointments so nothing can happen with WordPress until next Monday.
I’m going to clip my WordPress Rolodex cards together and take the novel revision fork.