Dandelyon's Worlds

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!

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.

Life has been hard since the election. Some of this was remembering the horribleness of that man's first term (to say nothing of the rest of his life), and dread of what he will do this time. But there have been a lot of things that have nothing to do with politics or the bad acts of politicians in the past, present, and future. But that, and problems sleeping related to that, made all the rest harder.

Skipping Windycon and there being no Chambanacon didn't help. But if I could manage one con, I wanted GAFilk more than Windycon. And I wasn't sure I could do even that.

But then, other things happened. The first one was the loss of my car, to an idiot who ran a red light. Sadly, My Angel was making a left turn and the other guy claimed he had a green light, and there were apparently no videos to prove who was lying, so was also out my deductible. But I didn't get official word of that until early on the morning of Christmas Eve, which is when my insurance company chose to call me and give me a deadline (the 30th) for getting out of the rental car, waking me up so I headed into the holiday too tired and emotionally stressed. More emotionally stressed, anyway. I mean, who could fall back asleep after that phone call?

And the need to buy a new car meant I needed to skip GAFilk, and I knew I needed to skip GAFilk before all the rest happened, though I didn't manage to act on that right away.

Next was a really horrible food reaction, much worse than usual and bad enough that I (eventually, for a while) wondered if somehow I'd caught the current terrible norovirus. The first wave of that hit the day after Christmas, when I'd hoped to go car shopping with my sister. I eventually felt well enough to drive home that night, where the second and much worse wave hit shortly after we got our stuff in from the rental car. So, the next day was a total waste in terms of acquiring a new car. I dragged my tired and hurting self to the car dealership the day after, and then for an abbreviated trip to a grocery store, which we were overdue for even before the holidays, and got two calls from Chicago that told me first that my brother had been found unresponsive and then confirmed that he had died.

Now, he was in really bad shape, medically, but we really didn't expect him to die so soon. (An autopsy showed it was a type of heart attack that, statistically, even if someone had been in the room and called 911 immediately he would have had less than a 10% chance of survival.) He was ready to go, since there were a number of things wrong the doctors couldn't fix or meaningfully improve. All in all, he got to see his whole family on Christmas Eve and Christmas, he got to taste the Mulberry Strawberry Jam I made and give it his stamp of approval, and when he died, he died quickly. But still, he was my little brother and how can you be ready for that? His memorial was during GAFilk, and I'm very glad I was at his memorial, though I missed my friends and the music and the magic of the con. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I ended up at the dealership on the 29th until they closed, and on the 30th for far too long (after going to turn over the title and get my plates from the old car, so they could be transferred), talking to a young man who I swear had never sold a car before. He couldn't answer basic questions about anything without going to ask his supervisors what to say. And finally they couldn't get the car I wanted because it was too far into the holidays to get the intense blue car from one of the other dealerships, and why get a car in a color I don't like when I can get a color I like? (Though I still miss the sparkly purple car after five+ years in the blue one.) Because the rental was due on the 30th (and they were a drop-off spot for the rental), they eventually gave me a "test drive" of a car I wasn't interested in, so I wouldn't have to start paying the rental company.

That led to me missing hours of the New Year's Eve zoom filk back at the dealership doing paperwork, because to my surprise and theirs, they were able to get the car on New Year's Eve. And all this still sick from whatever contaminated food I ate on Christmas day, exhausted from being up sick with norovirus-type symptoms, and with no emotional spoons whatsoever because my brother had just died. I'm sure that dragging myself out of bed to go anywhere, much less deal with a nice but totally clueless salesperson, did not help me recover from the bad food.

And it was a singularly odd experience to be sitting in a car dealership while being informed that people were crying on the radio in Florida, where my brother had spent decades teaching drumming and inspiring people to heal their hearts and make joyous sounds.

I had planned to do a new year's card draw, but even if the only thing that'd happened was the food reaction, that wasn't possible. At least I got focused enough to sing a little during the zoom NYE celebration, eventually.

And then, on NYE or NYD, My Angel started to complain of belly pain, at just the point in time that she might have gotten norovirus from me if that had been what I'd had. But she had no other symptoms for a day or so, just the pain, which then developed into abdomen and soon overwhelming chest pain. "Like a panic attack" she said. But she had none of her usual triggers for a panic attack. So, on the 2nd day of the new year, I took her to urgent care, who sent us to the ER.

After the last two experiences at Sinai, we instead went to St. Luke's South Shore, which was a much better, kinder, less chaotic, and much faster ER experience than Sinai had been. They took pictures, and told her she had an enlarged, very ugly and unhappy gallbladder and admitted her. She had the gallbladder out on Jan 3. In the meantime, my sisters were scrapbooking and planning the memorial gathering, none of which I could join in on. But at least the surgery went well (the surgeon was able to do it laparascopically, though it took a lot longer than expected. My Angel is doing well, and it is a very good thing it is gone. The pathology report was appalling (no wonder her body was panicking), but at least there was no cancer or other signs of future trouble.

Before my brother's memorial, one of my niblings' significant others had a medical emergency leading one of my sisters to run off to a different state, where another ER trip was needed, and happily happened quickly enough to let the doctors prevent some very serious consequences, though we didn't know the outcome would be as good as it has been during and after the memorial. (The cause is still, so far as I know, a medical mystery, not something anyone did foolishly or wrong. But that's someone else's story, the details aren't mine to share.)

My brother's memorial was very nice, and well suited to honoring his memory. I played Jammin Hands and got the whole room to join in clapping or tapping tables or stomping their feet, since he was always doing that, until his body started to fail. A few people even played percussion instruments he'd made.

And then on this last Friday, I let My Angel drive the new car the very short distance to her dentist (I have zero desire to spend hours at a dentist office where lots of people have to lay there with their mouths open during a quad-demic) and on the way back, while she was going over a four-lane bridge, some intoxicated pedestrian decided to run across three lanes of moving traffic (not in a cross walk) and roll over the hood of my brand new car. Happily a witness (another pedestrian) stuck around to talk to the police officer, who assured me that My Angel did nothing wrong and if anyone will get a ticket, it will be the pedestrian. But still, I didn't need the emotional stress, My Angel didn't need it either, and now I have to deal with yet another insurance clam. (And probably another rental while they get the minor cosmetic damage fixed. At least, it looks minor, but someone who knows what they're looking at needs to check it to make sure.)

Oh, and in the meantime, the person who'd been promising to adopt the FELV+ kitten my daughter has been caring for didn't actually arrange for the kitten to be brought to her as promised, so we're looking for someone else to give a very sweet sick little boy cat a forever home. I'm willing to do some driving to make that happen, but not all the way to either coast. I could, however, (for instance) meet someone at Sweetwater to hand over the kitten, if someone wanted me to.

So, my family and I could really use a few less "interesting" months.

So, Sunday night I was having a little ice cream after dinner, thinking of trying to write something before bed, when I heard one of our cats yowling in the bathroom. So I went to see what was wrong, and there was poor Donnflaith, hanging from her two front paws with the (thankfully tiny) bathroom window on said paws. Her hind feet were dangling over the tub. So, I went to rescue the very panicked cat. In the process she bit my left arm, I think to have something to hold onto while I was figuring out how to both hold her securely and lift the window off her paws.

I cuddled her for a bit, letting my arm bleed, then set her down on a chair hoping to check her paws, but she ran off and hid. This upset me, but first I had to deal with my arm. I knew cat bites are potentially dangerous, so I encouraged the wounds to bleed and then doused them with peroxide, rubbing it in thoroughly with a clean cue tip. Then, once the bleeding slowed, I used hydrophilic bandaids on them and took my Zyrtek to reduce allergic swelling.

Then I returned to trying to find the cat. When I spied her, she seemed to be limping—until I almost caught her—and then she was off like a shot. This left me very upset. I didn’t want to have to take her to an ER, but if she needed it, I wanted to know that right away. By now, all thoughts of writing—or anything else productive—had long flown from my head. It wasn’t until I saw that my arm was starting to swell that I found her again, and knew that a visit to urgent care was my first priority the next day, that she showed up again, tempted by canned cat food into letting me pet her forepaws and determine that she, at least, was fine.

I iced the arm, which didn't help, and got some sleep, then shoved some food into my mouth (thank goodness) and headed to the closest urgent care listed for my current ACA plan. Where I was turned away. They don’t, after all, take my insurance. None of the rest were close, but I picked one, started to drive, and called the insurance company to complain. The woman there apologized, saying the first place must have withdrawn from their plan, and they were probably behind on getting the website updated. She didn’t ask me which site had turned me away until I asked, exasperated with repeated useless apologetic re-explaining of the same stupid explanation, didn't she want to even know that? The only impressive thing she did was, finally, after asking if I’d gotten care yet (no, as I’d already told her I was still driving), offering to call the place I was headed for and confirming they would accept my insurance.

They would. Thank goodness. So, thanked her and kept driving. I eventually get to the address. There were no parking places within a half-block of the entrance that weren’t handicapped-only, so I parked and walked to the building with the correct address in foot-high numbers only to be told to go back to my car and drive around the building to the other entrance with the same number on it. Which also did not have any non-handicapped parking within a half-block walk of their door. The area by the door is marked "drop off only" and is next to an ambulance entrance. But at least once I get there, they let me use the bathroom and took me right back to be seen. The nice nurse suggested a local Walgreens that was open until 10 pm. (Again, thank goodness.)

The people there were nice, and looked at things and took my vitals and all that stuff. They told me I needed antibiotics (yeah, I knew that) and I told them that I’d had a (probable) allergic reaction to the first antibiotic of choice, so they settled on the next one. I told them “no corn” and they came back with a prescription. When I asked again about corn, the nice, very young man told me about the antibiotic in the pill, and asked if I’d prefer liquid to a pill. Exasperated (again), I said I’m fine with pills, just not with corn in pills. After I got (minimally) graphic about why I can’t take pills that have corn as a filler (they do no good if they come back up), he went back to their pharmacist. Finally, he came back and said I’d be getting the liquid, because every single formulation of the pill had corn in it.

Somewhere in the conversation, I learned that the urgent care is open until 8 pm, not the 5 pm that the insurance company’s website claimed. (I did not have the energy yesterday to call the insurance company again to complain about their inaccurate website again. Or today.) The doctor assured me if the pharmacy had any issues, they could call him. Oh, yeah, that's when I learned that the hours on the website were wrong. Then the doc wanted to draw a line around the swollen part of my arm to make it easier for me to tell if it’s getting bigger, and for future medical personnel to be able to tell how fast it’s getting bigger, if it does. And he can’t draw. So it was wrong and on my forearm were I couldn't avoid seeing it and that was making me crazy until I got home and discovered I could erase it with rubbing alcohol and fix it with one of my markers. (Next time I'll only consent if I can do the drawing, unless I can't see it!)

Someone warned me that I should eat food with this antibiotic, and I had a happy plan to stop at a natural foods store that’s just a few blocks from there to get some fruit to eat with the first dose, so I could take it before driving home. (The night before, I had planned to grab a bag of nuts on the way out of the house, but that morning I’d been more worried about getting to the urgent care than grabbing snacks.)(
And please, let there not be a next time.)

Anyway, I left the urgent care and drove to the pharmacy, waited in the long line for the drive-through, watched as they looked up my prescription, looked unhappy, and called the pharmacist over. She picked up the phone and explained very nicely that she didn’t have the strength that the doctor had prescribed, only half that strength. So, I asked, I need to swallow twice as much to get the same dose? Yes, that’s right. Ok, I said. But no, the pharmacist can’t substitute on her own, she has to ask the doc for permission. They promised they would contact the urgent care right away. I’ll be waiting, I said. Oh, no need, we’ll text you. That text thing doesn’t always work, and I’m on the other side of the city from home, so I’m very unimpressed with this plan. But arguing with people you need stuff from isn’t helpful, so I go to where I said I’d wait and I wait. For more than an hour. I wasn’t tracking time well, but the hour-long podcast I started after parking finished, and I started a new one. Finally I get into line again, saying the text thing doesn’t always work, so I’m checking. They haven’t heard from the doctor. They can’t help me until they hear from the doctor.

By now it’s approaching 7 pm. I’m starving. I have no food, no medicine, and the words, “Start the antibiotic today, because if it isn’t working you’ll need to go to the ER for IV antibiotics” ringing in my memory. I call the urgent care. “ThisIsXUrgentCareCanYouHold[click]” and I’m on hold. I wait for 15 minutes or so, hang up and try again. Same result. It is now after 7, and the urgent care closes at 8. I hang up and drive back to the urgent care, and walk the long walk to get inside. Some poor woman is there with a sick baby talking to the only receptionist left. I move to the side and try my best to look desperate and visible to the people in the back. Happily this works.

The nice nurse with the pretty flower tattoos comes up to talk to me. (Was I really too sick to remember to compliment her tattoos? I was. Both times.) She goes back to check. They do not have any communication from the pharmacy. I tell her the pharmacist says they can’t dispense as ordered, and she asks me to wait while she calls them. Eventually she returns to assure me that they are mixing the medicine right now, she took care of the problem.

I drive back to the pharmacy. Finally, they have my prescription—or, rather, a partial fill of it--two days worth, rather than the whole prescription. By this time, Rachel Maddow has started playing on the radio, and I am beat. I drive home (no wheat, no corn, and no canola means no fast food) and finally take the first dose of this stuff. Is it OK that they only have a partial? No. But I have to start the antibiotic, so I accept the partial.

So, I get home and grab leftovers and take the medicine. It doesn’t taste quite as bad as I expected, which is good since I have to manage to swallow 20ml of it (more than 4 teaspoons) twice a day. I managed to stay awake-ish for four hours or so, long enough to take the second dose, slept for nearly 10 hours straight, got up to eat and take another dose, and fell back into bed. I eventually got up again because once the antibiotic started to take effect, I wasn’t sleeping, but I’ve been foggy and low energy all day. And of course it was 90 degrees today, so at least downstairs was less hot than laying in bed.

So far, the score is two days pretty much completely wasted, and they better have the rest of my antibiotics filled in the morning. The swelling is going down, at least a little, so the redness only goes around half of my forearm, and on some of the edges, it also isn't as long. And I get to watch for a fever or other symptoms that, if they show up, indicate that I need to go to the ER anyway. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

This is decidedly not the adventure I needed right now, and I'm not sure it's even mostly over, which is worrisome.

But at least the cat is ok!

Which is to say, participating in a fun online challenge to write songs. The long covid is better than it was, though after a week of active participation, I hit that brain fog wall. I spent my fogged-up time yesterday well, at least, reading the new Penric and Desdemona story, Demon Daughter. I love those stories!

So far I have 11 songs, though a couple are musical improvisations, and one is just lyrics (and after sleeping on it, I want to extensively rewrite it). The site lists me as having 12 songs, because I'm participating in a "comments first" challenge, so I opened an empty song up for comments and then made it private after the first five comments were more than a sufficient-enough challenge. I'm still working on that one.

I also did a drawing using the lovely inktense colored pencils my daughter sent me a few years back to be a "postcard" prompt for another fawmer. She is sending me a postcard too, and since she was bragging that she obtained postcards meant for watercolors, I'm betting that's what I will get as my prompt. I have no idea what her image and text will be. Anyway, here's a photo of mine:

[img]https://imgur.com/a/YvGsa7y [/img] (color pencil drawing of three female musicians, playing autoharp, guitar, and (short scale bass or some smaller four-stringed instrument) )

Most of my rough demos for FAWM are hosted on the FAWM site this year, but one ended up on Soundcloud, so you can go have a listen if you care to. Be warned, it is rough, this was a skirmish song, so there was no time for practicing or redos. The instruments are autoharp and rainstick.

My living room is dedicated almost solely to music these days, which makes me happy.

Edit: Either I can't remember how to add a picture, or it changed. Again. Ugh.

Progress, health wise, continues to be slow and unpredictable. For example, the air quality yesterday was worse than it is today, but to me it felt worse today.

We did get some gardening done, mostly weeding around roses and watering the old fashioned way, since we weren't able to replace the broken seep hose before planting peas and beans and sunflowers along the area where the hose would need to be dug in. Peas are going great, beans are starting to be big enough to notice, but the sunflowers seem to be totally absent. That's puzzling, since I bought new seeds. Maybe they just germinate slower than beans? Anyway, trying to plant the seep hose now would be likely to destroy some of the veggies, so we'll probably stick with watering in the evening for the rest of the summer.

I do have some green tomatoes growing now, and the cucumber and squash plants are growing. And we finally got the sweet potato seedlings that grew from an old sweet potato in the kitchen in the ground. They might not have enough sun and enough time to make big tubers, but any tubers would be really cool.

Today, now that the day lilies are just about done blooming, I worked on digging up day lilies and other weeds that were encroaching on a couple of the roses, and got My Angel to help with digging up some weed trees in that area. Then we gave the roses some compost and ash from the cooking pit and watered them thoroughly. I always worry when I'm weeding close to a rose, because disturbing the roots can make them unhappy, but the ones I weeded around and gifted with compost last year really set out a lot of new branches and had lots of roses this spring, so I'll keep doing that. And at least today I didn't see the rose moving when I dug the shovel in, which is a good sign.

I ate some mulberries and peas while I was out there too. It's nice to have snacks to pick when I'm out in the garden.

I'm trying to do 50/90 this year, more actively than last year when I signed up and mostly ignored it. It is very FAWM-like, since it's at the same site, and with a lot of the more active FAWMers. The stated goal is to do 50 songs in 90 days, but I'm not at all worrying about the song count. (Especially since the aftermath of Covid is still kicking my butt--I started to do some gardening yesterday and ended up bringing the tools inside and falling asleep again. The cpap told me that between lunchtime yesterday and lunchtime today, I slept exactly 12.00 hours!)

There have been way too many fireworks around here. The noise isn't my issue so much as the huge amounts of smoke from the gunpowder and other chemicals. I always have breathing issues right around the 4th of July, until we have a good rain or three. In better news, we did have a sudden downpour today, which doubtless cleaned the air atm least a little (though I'm expecting more illicit fireworks for some days yet) and had the bonus effect of watering the garden. I slept through the optimal garden watering time yesterday.

(Optimal watering time, when you don't have a seep hose installed, is either well before the sun hits the leaves or after there's shade, as water on the leaves can lead to problems on days with bright sunlight especially if it's hot enough to otherwise stress (or encourage) the plants.) And it was too hot yesterday for me to even think about working out there in the sun.

The stress test went well. I haven't had a chance to talk with the doctor about the results, but the word normal appeared in a bunch of places, including the very important "normal response to exercise". So this stupid on-and-off chest tightness is not an incipient heart attack, and I don't need to fear exercising. I'm used to dealing with exercise and asthma, at least.

Maybe tonight it'll be quiet enough to start work on recording the song-swap song. If it keeps on drizzling, that will reduce people's excitement about shooting off fireworks.

I woke up for a call of nature, but presumably as a result of going to sleep early last night was unredeemably awake. Well, my body was, anyway. My mind was drifting, awake enough to be bored and not awake enough to do any mental work. I tried laying down for a while, then playing with pixel dragons briefly, and finally let myself be lured out into the very early morning sunshine.

I'm still taking things very slowly, since though the breathing feels better, my chest is still tight, which could mean some wonderful new health adventure like heart disease. (There is a stress test scheduled.) So there was no digging or anything stressful, but I did clip branches off weed trees we want to dig up or otherwise kill, and sat on my grandmother's very comfy tub stool to strip the leaves to throw in the compost. And now the compost pile is covered with pretty green leaves, and needs to be turned.

That was enough to get me awake enough to be hungry. Time for leftovers. And then? Either napping or Eurofilk. Or maybe a little of both, but if it's to be napping, the CPAP will be on.

This post-covid crap is horrible. I'm behind on everything possible.

On Saturday, I (very slowly) got the tomato plants we bought Friday into the ground while listening to the Festival of the Living Rooms concerts; My Angel got the squash and hostas planted. (I had daydreams of getting some more showy shade plants to put under the mulberry tree, but My Angel likes hostas, and they were on sale and placed easy-to-find at the store. I then very slowly got the gardening tools and stool inside, and planned to plant cucumber (seeds, sadly the store had no plants) on Sunday. The weather laughed at me and provided chilly rain all day.

Today (Monday), I had a late breakfast, did the Cologard thing (which left me exhausted--again, this is a dreadful virus. I'm not even testing positive any more! I so very much did not need this!) Anyway, the cat wanted me to lay down and pet her. I did, and fell asleep for more than three hours. It was too dark for planting cucumbers by then. Hopefully tomorrow.

There's lots of roses out there, but I have not got out to properly photograph them, much less do pruning and weeding.

I did manage to do a little singing during the Festival, though. Friday, singing was really hard. I just didn't have enough breath. I had some focus, though, and did some painting. On Saturday and Sunday singing was better, but I didn't have much focus for it. People said I sounded good, though! In between songs, I mindlessly deleted old political and sales e-mails that were too boring to bother with before. There's still way too many of them, but I zapped thousands.

It was very pleasant listening to so many friends singing to me, sitting in my living room and doing almost nothing. But in a better world, it could have been very pleasant singing lots of songs and getting something else done in between turns. Very pleasant indeed!

I never did get back out to take more pictures of the wonderful-smelling roses, but I got this shot of one of the first ones last week. I'll try for more tomorrow, if I'm feelig up to it.

So, when I've been on antibiotics, I try to eat food that naturally has probiotics in it. Yogurt is one of the easiest, and it works fine as a topping on a half-banana split, but I have to be careful of sugar, so too much of that is bad for me in a different way.

Yesterday I tried lemon yogurt with onion (sliced very thin and then cut into shortish lengths), thyme, and dill as a sauce for my salmon (courtesy of a sale at whatever store my Angel was at recently). I was accidentally very heavy on the thyme, but I like thyme.

It was wonderful! Using actual onion gave it a satisfying crunch too.