Dandelyon's Worlds

I am a filker, a writer, an artist, a dreamer.

For the 2014 A-Z challenge, I did ficlets in a new fantasy world, featuring catkin and other fantastic beings. Here is the A-Z prompt list, with links to the posts as I write them.

I also do online Tarot readings here. You are always welcome to ask if I'm up to doing a paid reading, but I periodically offer to draw a free card for people as well. The landing page is here.

Life was chaotic in the next few years (siding falling off house, roof leaks, Aunt and Mom dying, covid, and more) and my creative output has suffered. I was finally getting going again when I caught the Covid, and was left with a bad case of Long Covid.  That slowed me down even more, but I'm still here.

I have a Patreon over here, which lately has been mostly poetry and songs. But I write about the creative process, share bits of works in progress, share my photos, and more over there.  And now you can join my patreon as a free member, while you consider whether to upgrade to a paid membership.  I am working on getting the lyrics to all my songs over there, and lyric posts are always open to the public.  I hope to have more music recordings for paid members there soon.

I also have a bandcamp:  https://wylddandelyon.bandcamp.com/

You can find links to my flash fiction, to my serialized story, Fireborn, and to my poetry and songs over at my (still under construction, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, in suspended animation) website, www.wyld-dandelyon.com.

You used to be able to find some of my fiction, poetry, worldbuilding, and artwork over at www.tornworld.net, along with the fiction, poetry, world-building, and art of my talented co-creators there. Sadly, at some point the html code was updated in ways that broke the site, and we haven't had the money to hire someone for the many, many hours of work that would be needed to bring the site up to date.  I do have a cozy mystery written in that world, and most of a second one, and hope to do a kickstarter and get it out in the world, but that hasn't happened yet.  I plan to copy a lot of my art and stories over into my Patreon, because i'm proud of them and don't want them to remain unavailable.

If you miss my old, long-winded landing page, you can find it and the landing pages for various projects by searching on the "landing" tag.

I have a lovely long-haired Siamese cat. And Siamese cats are very vocal, and normally I’m good with that. Lately, however, it seems like she wants to just yell at me, over and over, and since I’ve been headachy on and off (and mostly on) since mid-October, I have gotten more and more impatient about that. And it’s not as if she’s good at non-verbal communication. Even when I look her in the eyes and ask what she’s yelling about, she doesn’t lead me to an empty water or food dish, or come to me and ask to be picked up. Heck, she won’t even stand still to be picked up.

But most of the time, if I do manage to snag her before she darts under something or far out of reach, and I hold her gently and pet her, she starts to purr and continues purring for a long time. Sometimes, if I’m not too busy to hold her that long, she tucks her head into the crook of my elbow and falls asleep. Other times she’ll just stop purring and start to look like she’s done resting, and I’ll set her down and she does, indeed, go off to do whatever her kitty heart wants in that moment, done with yelling at me for a while.

And I know a lot of people who resemble her in some way. Some of them have a hard time identifying what they want until they get it, or until they get a response that is most definitely not what they want (and sometimes not even then). Some of them know what they want, but aren’t sure how to articulate it, or how to navigate difficult social waters to get to where they want to be. Some of them are prickly or anxious, and take actions that, like my cat running away to avoid being picked up, are totally incongruent with getting another person to give them the kind of attention they are craving. We are all imperfect, and we are all faced with situations where our old reflexes make a situation worse—and it’s very hard to change old reflex reactions, no matter why they formed, but especially if those habits were initially formed to protect us from trauma.

I expect my cat will continue, for the rest of her life, to run from me when she wants me to stop being busy and hold and love her. (And it’s not that she doesn’t trust me. She hides from strangers and is much more careful to avoid being picked up by anyone else, including my partner who has fed and cared for her for as long as she’s been alive. It’s as if she slows down her reflex hiding reaction for me, so I can catch her and love her.) I don’t know of any trauma that caused this reaction, and if there was trauma I should know about it since she was born under the radiator in my living room. I figure that if she was human, she’d have a formal diagnosis of an anxiety disorder—but that isn’t the point here. The point is that I do my best to meet her where she is and to give her the things she needs even if she doesn’t know how to ask for them, and even if my head is throbbing and I’m desperate to have her stop yelling because it is grating on my nerves and making my headache worse.

I have another cat who never likes to be held and petted. He loves getting petted when he’s in the mood, but only while he’s standing on his own four feet. He is, unlike my Siamese girl, very good at non-verbal communication and letting me know what he wants. And I try my best to meet him in the middle too, though that requires very different skills and behaviors than my Siamese girl needs.

And similarly, I try to discover what my friends need that they may not be able to articulate clearly and offer it to them, if it is reasonable for me to do that. I try to figure out what things they’re good at and honor them for those things. I try to figure out what they are bad at and to not demand they try to be someone they are not. If they have reactions that I have even the slightest suspicion are due to trauma, or to protective habits formed early in life, I try to forgive them their rough edges and work around those behaviors, because I know how very hard it is to change them. I try very, very hard not to trigger trauma reactions, even if I don’t understand how that reaction was at some point in their past protective enough to be repeated until it became a deeply engraved habit.

I know, for instance, that some of the behaviors that a small child might devise to protect themselves or at least reduce the harm they suffer when they are in a bad situation (and do not have the independence, skills, and resources or legal right to just leave that bad situation) can be deeply dysfunctional when those behaviors are continued into adulthood. But even if they realize why they started doing those things, and why they became engrained habits, those behaviors are very hard to change. A person wanting to change those things has not only to fight inertia, but to also somehow address the pain and fear that, as a small child (or even as an adult), led to them starting to do it in the first place.

So I try, not always successfully, to give people respect for the good things about them and to work around their rough spots. It is usually none of my business what trauma a person suffered in the past. I don’t even need to know if they are reacting to trauma or if the problem is as organic to who they are as my dyslexia and dyscalculia, which no matter how much I’ve gotten good at working around them and training my brain to compensate for them, are not things that can be cured and not things that I can grow out of. (And I got good enough that if there was a word someone needed the spelling for in a law firm, they asked me.)

So regardless of what might or might not be the cause of someone’s rough edges, I try to look past those things and figure out if we have enough in common to be close friends, or if I should just strive to be cordial but not intimate friends, or if our faults clash badly enough, that we should stick to a relationship in that category that many people call “friends” but in my heart I think of as acquaintances or coworkers and I’m best off being polite but not trying to get close. And then I try to maintain and respect the relationship as it actually is, and and as it naturally develops, not as I might wish it would be.

I have been told that I give people too much benefit of the doubt, that I make excuses for people, that I forgive too easily. But I know I won’t always be correct in my assessment of people or in the assessment of their actions, especially ones that hurt me and my friends. A long time ago, after a lot of consideration, I decided I’d far rather give people more grace than they deserve and later have to say I was wrong about that (and either confront them or back away from doing things with them) than to give them less grace than they deserve and unjustly cause them pain that can never be taken back.

And now I looked back at this whole long bit of writing, and I thought, wow, why did putting everything aside to pet my cat for a half hour lead to all this? And I knew, instantly on asking that question that the thing that prompted this particular stream-of-consciousness meditation, was certain recent events in my primary and most beloved community.

Apparently I felt a need to consciously look at how I’ve been doing things and why, to make sure I am clear about my goals for my own behavior when things are rough, and to reexamine my own tactics and the reasons for them. I wanted, or my inner higher self wanted, to consider whether I might have learned something new that might lead me to reassess some part of how I’m thinking about these personal ideals and also to see if I want to change how I implement them in my actual behavior.

Or to put it another way, to consider, not for the first time, how best to be the best me that I can for myself, my friends, and my very dear community.

And if you chose to stick around and read to the end of this whole introspective thing, thanks for hanging out with me!

I remember, a long time ago, sitting outside, with a couple of my filking friends, talking about our dreams of making albums. We were thinking of cassette albums, then, it being before the technology for CDs became accessible for people like us--though with kids and jobs that weren't making us rich, and with nobody in the Midwest doing filk albums, those dreams weren't likely happening any time soon. But still, what songwriter doesn't dream of putting out an album or two?

And I had plenty of songs for an album or two, mostly songs that I've never recorded, though a few are on albums compiled from open filk circles at various conventions. I've got those cassettes somewhere (I still haven't found everything that got moved when we had more than one roof-leak insurance claim in the same year, some years back, and stuff got moved out of the wet very fast and randomly). I accepted a copy of each cassette in lieu of the first few dollars of royalties, knowing that the cost of the cassette was more than I'd likely ever earn from those recordings, and was very happy to get them.

It's a very different world now, with affordable microphones and recording software, and no need to have bulky tapes to record on and huge mixing boards and all that other stuff you used to need to make records. And I have a decent microphone and a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and so I've been able to make my own recordings, and some of them are available on Bandcamp. (https://wylddandelyon.bandcamp.com/)

Others have been shared on Patreon, for paid members, as a heartfelt thank-you for their support.

But back to my story. After a couple of people recently told me they missed hearing some of my earlier songs, I got the idea to make my next short Bandcamp album using some of those very first songs I wrote, and calling it Time Capsule--what if I had recorded the songs back then? What might that album have looked like?

I can't sing with my 20-year-old voice any more. I've grown older, of course, but I've also learned a lot about singing and vocal technique--and my asthma is properly treated these days too. My voice is actually, I think, stronger and more reliable than it was back then. And I'm having to relearn chord patterns, and to try to remember the details of what I was doing to accompany those songs back then--intros and outros, and flourishes--stuff that always lived only in my memory. And memory isn't perfect, even when it's not all dusty and faded.

But it's happening! I found a perfect old picture of me to use, and a wonderful writer-and-artist friend made it into the cover you'll see soon. I gathered my lyric sheets for those early songs, and had too many, and limited myself to before the turn of the century and still had too many songs for just one album! So I picked 10, which pulls it out of the "short album" category, but, assuming I can get them all finished and polished, will make me very happy. And I've been practicing and tuning autoharps and guitars very carefully, and recording.

And best of all, when I talked about this soon-to-be digital album, and played some of those songs at the local housefilk, those same two friends I was dreaming with on that long-ago afternoon were singing along with me, remembering old harmonies or improvising new ones, and they both kindly agreed to be my backup singers on this album!

This makes me very happy. Very happy indeed.

And it reminds me of one of the things about creative work: If you keep on dreaming, and working, and sharing your dreams with your friends, dreams can, indeed, come true. Often not in the way you first imagined, and never as fast as you imagined, at the start (or almost never) but perseverance and being good to your creative friends and acquaintances can, in the end, help a dream become real.

So, look for Time Capsule, by Wyld Dandelyon and friends (And Friends! Squeeee!!!!), on the next Bandcamp Friday--which is August 1! (So soon! So much to do still!)

And in the meantime, if I don't notice you trying to reach me, it might be because I have my phones and computer all on mute because I'm recording, or mixing, or very intently listening, trying to make the recordings as good as I possibly can before the first.

When you set out to record a thing, you want it to be perfect. Or, at least, I do. I want every chord to ring out pure and clear, and all the words right (despite being dyslexic), and the notes to be on pitch. I want the additional instruments, percussion, and so on to be just right too.

It seems reasonable to want perfection. But perfection is rarely (if ever) attainable. And I don't have forever to make recordings of my songs available to people. While my health is stable, I've had chronic illness forever (or at least since puberty) and my brother--my younger brother--dying earlier this year reminded me that we are all mortal, and though we don't know the number, we know our days are not infinite.

So I am committed to recording things as well as I can in the short term, rather than spending months or years polishing them and perhaps never memorializing them for people to hear. Whether or not it will make a difference to anyone else, it makes a difference to me when I do, finally, accomplish that.

And so, late last month, with Bandcamp Friday looming, I sat down to work on recording at least a few more songs.

As usual, I was running behind where I wanted to be on the project. I'd come down with bronchitis, and that slowed me down a lot, and the stupid corn allergy delayed getting antibiotics besides. It was way too close to the deadline when I again had energy and focus for recording, just barely. And then I developed a sore throat, which was Just Not Fair.

But I sat down, tuned instruments, picked a song, and started. I first worked on Magic Comes From Within, and recorded the main tongue drum part. My focus wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I kept making mistakes, and so I kept doing it over again, until I got a take that was mostly good. Then instead of pushing myself to try to achieve perfection, I did some editing in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to get a track that I was happy to sing to.

Next I sang, and recorded that again several times too, before I was reasonably happy with it.

After that, I'd planned to add chimes, but in the moment decided to play with the tongue drum some more instead--I'd gotten headachy too, and the chimes sounded jangly and harsh in the moment, instead of tinkly and lovely. Happily, that worked (and without lots of mistakes and re-recording, to my surprise).

I finally added bass, not much, nothing difficult, since there was no time to compose and practice something fancy, and I certainly didn't have the focus to improvise something fancy! But the very simple bass part, added to what I had already, made the song feel finished to me, and the whole made me smile.

The other tracks had similar issues. The headache and sore throat continued, so my focus wasn't great. I made a lot more mistakes than I usually do, on instruments, words, and vocals. I re-recorded tracks a lot, simplified some of the things I'd planned, improvised a little, and practiced my limited audio editing skills rather more than I had thought I'd need to.

And I listened, over and over, tweaking the settings, finding spots that needed editing or re-recording, and doing that work, before listening again.

And then I called my partner to be my beta-listener, and got feedback. so I could edit some more and listen some more, before calling her back to listen to the improved version.

Eventually, I had seven songs recorded. I listened again. I didn't like how my voice sounded on two of them--it sounded rough. Should I redo those tracks? My beta-listener said absolutely not, they sounded good. When pressed, she added that she thought the roughness added to the emotion in those songs.

And I remembered listening to a piece on NPR where they played a snippet of an untrained young woman singing, with no correction. To my ear, her voice was pleasant, though the pitch imperfections were definitely noticeable. Then they played the same snippet after thorough pitch correction, and it was no longer pleasant. To me, it sounded as if the life and joy had been sucked out of it.

I decided to call those recordings "good enough", and finished up checking to make sure all the details were entered on the Bandcamp site (tags, cover art, lyrics, the about-the-song bits, the recordings--though I'm sure Bandcamp wouldn't have let me post without the recordings--and the credits), took a deep breath and clicked the button to publish the album.

And then I stayed up a bit to post about the album, since it was already Bandcamp Friday, and I would get more of the sales price if people bought it that day, so they had to have a chance to know it existed that same day.

Could I have made better recordings with more time? Possibly. Could I have done better without the bronchitis, sore throat, and headache? Probably. And maybe I'll re-record those songs a different time, or maybe I won't, but they exist out there now, for people to listen to, and that is very satisfying.

I did the thing. And that matters.



This is the first cover art I made for the album. There are a lot of things I like about it, but looking at it onscreen, in the tiny thumbnail-size that is displayed on Bandcamp, I decided that it was too hard to read the title, and so I made another one using a different picture I took the morning of May Day. (And we won't talk about the other cover art I made where I typoed a whole word, and wrote Magick In My Mind instead of the proper title...)

It matters, I think (and I've been told), to make the title and author readable even in a thumbnail-sized image of the cover.

As with the recordings, given more time and more health, I probably could have made better cover art, both for the album as a whole and for the individual songs. I'd had plans to do some painting for at least a couple of the songs; that didn't happen. By Thursday morning, I knew there was no way for it to happen; I wasn't even sure yet how many songs I would be able to finish. (I managed 7 of the 8 that were on the top of my list for this album, but it was only a few days earlier that I'd been thinking that at least I had 3.)

So, after delivering a friend home safely from a medical procedure, I took time to stop a few times on the way home to take pictures. It made sense to me to use photos taken on May Day for an album of magickal songs anyway.

I did it! I got an album out for Bandcamp Friday, despite bronchitis and a sore throat!

I also got cover art made both for the album as a whole and for the individual songs, mostly using pictures I took on Beltaine.  (Happy belated Beltaine!)  (I didn't celebrate Beltaine in the usual way, but ferrying a friend home from the surgery center, taking photos of spring flowers, and recording some of my Pagan songs is certainly a proper way to celebrate, even if a bit unusual.)

There are a whole seven magical songs for you to enjoy, if you are so inclined. I hope they bring you a little joy and hope, in a time when those things are badly needed.

Here is the link:  https://wylddandelyon.bandcamp.com/album/magick-in-my-heart

And now I'm going to go fall in bed.  Gently, because the cat is probably waiting for me. And happily, because I'm proud of the work I did getting these song done.  I'd be delighted, if you listen, to hear what you think.

 

*Bandcamp Friday is a day when Bandcamp passes on their share of the money you pay for music to the artist.  They do it 5-6 times a year.  (They can't do anything about credit card fees, paypal fees and the like, but it's still a bonus for the musicians, and much appreciated.)

I have baby pea plants! And we got some potato seedlings into the ground outside yesterday, nice and near the compost pile/pit, so we can add dirt as they get tall. The spinach, beets, and turnips are still sleeping under the ground.

Last night I worked on recording a song, Magic Comes From Within. I did it a little differently than I did for the 2022 FAWM, when I did it as part of a "no strings no synth" challenge, and used one of the Idiopan tongue drums and chimes and singing, all in one track. This time I started with the drum, all on its own track, added the lyrics, and then on a whim tried adding some more Idiopan instead of the chimes. I really liked the result of that, and then added some bass. I'm very pleased with it!

I'm thinking about what song(s) to work on tonight. BandCamp Friday is this Friday, and I want to get at least another short album out for it. (It will be either a very short album or a medium-length one, depending on how things go.) At least, that's the plan. My lungs are tighter today, now that I'm out of the prescribed oral steroids, but I've been singing with asthma since I became a teenager, so the only issues should be time, energy, focus--all the stuff the stupid long Covid is still affecting, with sadly unpredictable severity.

And, you know, all the normal tasks of daily living.

I am tentatively calling the album Magick In My Heart right now, since I think our world needs some good magic and many blessings. Wish me luck with my energy levels (and with city noise levels when I'm trying to record).

I wanted to get the onion starts into the ground today, but I had a doctor appt with the CPAP doc. One good thing that happened due to this is that I learned I'm just one month from being able to order a new CPAP machine. The current one has been giving me occasional weird error messages, so they're ordering a new one for me (next month). This is a very good thing, with the Dummy's Tarrifs, because it would be a disaster for me if I could not replace the CPAP when it inevitably fails. After the doc appt, I stopped at a grocery store for some veggies and dairy stuff, and by the time that was put away and the chicken was in the oven, it was too dark to do gardening.

Well, there's tomorrow, with no doc appts and no PT for My Angel either. I can make plans!

I've been under the weather. This time I managed to get Bronchitis just from the end of the winter heating season (unless a friend with a congestive heart condition was actually sick, and not just coughing because of the heart condition). But I think this was coming on earlier, and the med regime my former allergist suggested was keeping my lungs and sinuses a lot clearer than in the past, but not enough for my body to clear out the infection.

Well, I came to this conclusion Friday, with (among other things) singing at the Eurofilk showing me I was unusually short of breath for singing; I already had an appointment with my newish primary doc who I really like on Monday, and when I tried to call the allergist last month to set up an appointment, there was no answer or answering machine on his number, or on the alternate number I found on Google. I did find an article about him listing him as 81 years old, and I'm not sure how long ago that was written, so I'm assuming he died or retired. So, I waited out the weekend and got tireder and tireder, and shorter and shorter of breath.

Happily, she was willing to prescribe antibiotics and steroids (if I'd gotten antibiotics on Friday, that might have been enough), unhappily, when they figured out that the only way they could give me the meds the doc thought most appropriate that didn't have corn in it (kids' liquid, again), it turned out that the pharmacy couldn't fill it until today. It was too late to try to talk the doc into prescribing something different, as the clinic was closed.

So today I woke up way too early, and was NOT falling asleep again (my body does insist on waking when I really need meds, which freaked out my RN mother when I was first sick enough to always be awake when she came in to wake me up to take them). This was handy in that I was able to deal with a bank overdraft for my grown-up kid (she's still using the account I got her when she went to Denmark in 4th grade so I could easily transfer money to her if there was an unexpected need, so, being awake I saw the text notification) (Her birthday is later this month, so an early birthday gift was perfectly reasonable).

And then I had food and called the pharmacy, because I WANTED those meds before the rest of the day's errands, which included getting My Angel to her PT appointment, mailing a thing (in a post office, since there seems to be no more drop-off boxes outside our regular post office any more--WTF, government?)--and going to pick up meds at a different pharmacy too.

The strip mall the post office was in had one of the closing JoAnne Fabrics, which had almost no fabric left, and not much of anything else either. I did find some things to buy, including two substantially marked down big bags designed to hold a sewing machine and sewing stuff, but which I plan to use one of for author stuff (books, display, etc.) on the assumption that I'll do signings at cons again, and the other for acrylic paints, brushes, and the like since my current bag and plastic bin plan isn't working out as well as I'd like, and because having that stuff on wheels will be very convenient.

I also got some beads, wire, a thimble and multitool, sewing machine needles, an ironing pad to put on a table, some tape, a couple of pillow forms for planned gifting, and, surprisingly, a basket of tumbled stones to put in the fishtank. Sadly, the heavy-duty dolly they had pictured in the front as available had already been sold. I looked at the jewelry making stuff, thought about the heavy duty crimper and some of those beads, but I haven't been making jewelry lately and can use the hemostats I use for holding autoharp strings to crimp things, so I left those behind. I did also get some very discounted project boards, so if we decide to go to one or more protests, we can take signs.

And I took photos of our daffodils in the middle of all that.

I am cheered by all the photos of protests I'm seeing, and by how badly Elon's car company is doing. It gives me hope. Keep contacting your elected officials, we've got to wear them down until they stand up to our very cruel and foolish leader.

Now I am going to hit post and go watch Rachel show all those pictures of the signs again, and do Duolinguo, so I don't miss a day, and fall in bed. Maybe I'll manage to post Daffodil pics tomorrow.

It's cold and grey outside. The peas, spinach, turnips, and beets we planted last week have not sprouted yet, which is doubtless a blessing, since it's supposed to drop below freezing tonight. But those are all cold-weather crops, so they'll be ok.

The warm weather crops that I've planted so far are all safe inside, though some of the tomatoes are very badly in need of thinning, and I don't really have things set up for that. My old flats are also getting really fragile, so I'll have to obtain some newer ones.

I'm feeling really frazzled right now. I know that's because of doing taxes. I have senseless anxiety about that, and it isn't as simple as it ought to be. Tax laws are truly unnecessarily complex and written in confusing jargon, and since that person appointed a new head of the post office, I never get all the forms I need in the mail and always have to spend time chasing them down on the internet or by phone. And the increasing trend of identity theft means that not only do I have to cudgel my dyscalculic brain to focus enough to copy a zillion numbers accurately from forms and my records into the depths of the online program I use, I also have to cudgel my brain to remember the last five digits of my social (which is stupidly hard), and copy numbers from third party authentication notices.

On top of that, when I had questions, I had to sit and wait and twiddle my thumbs, waiting for calls back from the experts on call, and some of the experts were just as frustrating as the numbers. The women ranged from OK to good; the men from bad to horrible this year. (Yes, I know you are trying to help me, but you are telling me to enter a lie in order to get rid of this error message the program is giving me, and I know better to lie about whether I stopped using a particular car last year...) (And then there was the guy who hung up on me when he didn't want to bother to answer my question.) Ugh.

And now it's done, and I feel like I should be able to just sigh in relief and move on, but my brain feels like a wet noodle and my back and neck are still all stress-knotted. Some of this is just stupid anxiety stuff, some is being tired from the forced focus needed to enter so many numbers accurately, but a lot is just an unwanted reminder that the stupid long covid isn't gone. And that feeds my anxiety--did I do something in the on-again off-again, tired, long-covid brain-fog that wasn't correct, and might I have failed to catch it when I reviewed everything?--which won't help me to recover and get on to recording some music or writing new songs or even maybe new fiction.

It's a lot more fun to consider my gardening plans. And gardening, while it requires simple actions on my part, really doesn't require much ability to think.

I don't mind tasks that don't require thinking, but many things that require thinking are a lot more fun, and I really mind not feeling up to doing those fun things!

Elizabeth Barrette is writing poetry to prompts today: https://ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/14861900.html The topic is cozy coping skills, which is certainly something we all could use more of these days!

#poetry #scifi #fantasy #poetryfishbowl #superheros and more

New people are very welcome. If she gets a new sponsor or a new prompter, she publishes an extra free poem. And the conversations in the comments are often interesting.

Got woken up this morning to learn that My Angel's PT was out sick today. (Someone recommended a PT that specializes in helping people with balance issues caused by eye problems, and the lady is fantastic.) I got the receptionist to schedule a replacement appointment and put it on the calendar. Then, since I forgot to do it yesterday, now that my new health insurance card has arrived, I called to order new CPAP supplies and cleaned the ones I currently have. Naturally, by that time I was quite emphatically awake.

I did a bunch of unexciting little things, figuring that when My Angel got up we could go out and make a new archway for the entrance of the garden. The old one, constructed mostly of saplings we cut down and wild grape vine (and wire) had lost structural integrity last autumn, due to age, wind, and My Angel falling against it. I'd pinned it to the tomato cages to keep it from falling on the car over the winter, and took it down before the big wind storm a couple of weeks ago.

By the time she was awake and almost ready to do stuff, it wasn't quite too cold for the planned work, and I'd moved the car to give me a place on the ground to build the arch, and had just gotten started pulling stored saplings out to assess which one would work best without additional cutting when she told me she would be talking funny for a bit. What? What are you talking about? Her temporary crown came off. So in I went to have her call her student dentist, who said it was too late to get her in today and sent her off to the pharmacy to buy a "lost filling and loose cap repair" kit.

I consulted with her about the arch; the best sapling was taller than I'd hoped for, but I didn't want to get the axe out and cut it shorter, and My Angel is too tall for a short arch anyway. She headed off to the car and I decided to get the shovel and dig the post hole I'd need (one because one of the supports was still there from last year) and found the door was locked. Thankfully she hadn't driven off yet, or I'd have been locked out without my tools while she was gone!

So, door unlocked again, off she went to the pharmacy and I got to work on the arch alone. Sigh. That wasn't the plan! But I did ok, taking the wire archtop I'd made from an old piece of roof antenna and the sapling, some still-limber branches, some lengths of grape vine, and gardening wire, and made 3/4 of an arch on the ground, looping the metal sun-and-moon and butterfly decorations to it, wiring it all together, and then, with the bit of metal fence we'd put up earlier this spring next to the woodpile as a support, got it into place, wired to the metal fence on one side and to the support sapling that's still attached to the twine fence on the other side, and at least that bit is done.

I still have to pull down the bean and morning glory vining from the rest of the twine fence, and probably replace a couple of other supports. But first, tomorrow if the weather remains sunny, I want to get peas planted. And probably spinach. Hmm...I wonder if I could plant anything else this early. Cabbage maybe? Google says early to mid April, and we're near enough to the lake to be in a warmer planting zone than most of Milwaukee, so yes. Onion starts? Google says mid to late April, so no. Turnips? yes. Beets? Possibly. Carrots? No, wait until the threat of frost has passed, unless it's an "early variety". (But the seed packets I have say "as early as the soil can be worked". I'll trust the packets, since those instructions were written for the variety in the packets.

So, there's a bunch of things I can plant tomorrow! Probably more than I'll have time for.

By the time My Angel returned, it was windy and the sun was low enough to be behind the houses on the west side of the street, so it was quickly getting colder. We went inside, and I looked at the flats I'd planted with tomato seeds.

A couple of days before Equinox, I'd planted a flat with "volunteer" tomato seeds. Volunteer meaning I'd taken tomatoes from my garden that were starting to rot and smashed them on a dry pot of dirt and let them dry there (because I read that tomato seeds need to sit in spoiled tomato juice for a while to sprout well). Later, I needed the pots and dumped the contents into baggies, making it really hard to tell what was seeds and what was just dirt. So I just spread about a tablespoon of the mix onto each pot in the flat, covered it with seed starting mix, watered it, and put it on a heating pad and under a rectangular plastic "dome". These seeds will grow children of one or more of the tomatoes I'd planted, so things like Northern Lights, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Black Krim, and other heirloom varieties, usually ones that are striped, yellow, green, or purple.

Then on Equinox, right before and after the "moment", I planted two more flats, one all tomatoes from seed packets, and one 1/3 tomatoes and 2/3 peppers (cayenne and sweet Italian peppers, mostly, some from seed packets and some from plants grown in the garden last year. Seedlings were already starting to show on the first flat at that point. Wow, that was fast!

Today, I found two tiny sprouts in the second flat, a Purple Russian (from a free thank-you packet sent by a company I'd ordered other stuff from) and one, well, I don't know. Apparently I was tired enough I forgot to label the last two tiny pots. Argh. There are no sprouts in the third flat yet. But in the first one, most of the pots had at least a dozen happy seedlings. I prepped a fourth flat (adding dirt to the 18 little pots), took out three of the most crowded pots, and filled the flat and four other small pots with 3 seedlings each, leaving three or four each in the original pots. All those babies (roughly 75) were from just two of the little 3" pots. The other one I returned still-crowded to the flat.

I've gotten really good at transplanting tomato seedlings, and three to a pot is too many, so even if I lose 1/3 of the transplants, unless there's some other problem with the babies, or I get sick enough to forget to water them, I'll have lots of tomato seedlings to give away. I plan to put a fan into my sprouting room this year, to hopefully get stronger stems and leaves; since I haven't done that before there may be a learning curve on doing that well; that's one possible source of losing some of the plants before outdoor-planting time.

We tried to glue the temporary crown to My Angel's tooth with the recommended product, with a lot less success than I had with the arch and the seedlings. The tooth is not bothering her, so she said she was done trying. I hope they can see her tomorrow to glue it back on properly, as I'm afraid the tooth might be fragile without the temp covering it. We'll see tomorrow, I guess. If nothing else, she has another appointment Friday.

And, I got distracted and didn't hit post. So, an update: I have the seeds that it would be ok to plant tomorrow in a plastic thingy for easy transport outside, and I should sort some papers or play some music. I'm not doing that until after I post this, so I'll just say see you soon. I'll try to take a pic of the arch to share tomorrow too.