Two words: supervolcano

Ha! I know that's just one word, but at work I'm dealing with questionnaires that say, "Describe this dog in one word," and the amount of people who don't know the definition of the number one is staggering.

"Always ready to show!"
"Fun/loving/energetic"
"He is amazing"

Next time, I'll say, "Describe this dog in one (1) word." Perhaps that'll clear things up.

Although the responses are all delightful to me. I like it when people at dog shows take the time to write down cute stuff about their dogs. It's all about the dogs, after all.

Oh, no, wait--today it's all about the supervolcano.

Evidence can be found here.

Please resume with your day, which you may feel is oddly invaded by my multiple blog entries. See, this is what happens when you take away my computer.

And so it grows...

(or, "Wishful Thinking")

We recently had some landscaping done in our backyard. What was once just ivy is now a terraced little yard, and what was once a deck that belonged to a monstrous 1980s party hot tub is now refinished and furnished with barbecue supplies.

Because of this, and also because of books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore's Dilemma, I have taken a keen interest in trying to grow some plants. Some edible, some not.

I have a history of killing plants. Or, more euphemistically, not keeping them alive. So I decided that maybe growing things from scratch would give me more of a sense of involvement and responsibility. I bought some seeds and planted bell peppers and oregano in a couple of little pots. Two bell pepper seeds sprouted, but the oregon was silent. So one day, when I was bored, I took a few garlic cloves that had sprouted in the kitchen and stuck them in the oregano pot. Naturally, four days later, hundreds of little oreganos sprouted out of the soil.

Last weekend, I transplanted some things and planted some new things, and now we're playing the waiting game.

I was right about being more invested, too. I water those little buggers every day.

Here's a tour of how things look right now.



This is my shade garden, at the side of the house where the hammock (a $15 cloth number, criminally comfortable) is... mostly shady, especially later in summer as the sun goes off behind the trees. This is all new planting. The tall guy at the back will be a fern; so will the terra cotta round pot. The two in the foreground should be begonias. No, will be! Will be begonias. Positive thinking.



This is a place under the overhang of the downstairs balcony where I dropped some of the oregano sprouts. I can't believe that so many of those seeds sprouted at once. Talk about an embarrassment of riches, and poor planning. I stuck this ball of dirt here as an afterthought, hoping it might decide to fill in the awkward area between the ivy and the little curb. That big green thing is new; it's not oregano. I don't know what it is. I am also trying to grow a leather strap, apparently.



These are my sunny plants. In the back are Peruvian Daffodil and asparagus; then some garlic (thriving! go figure), mint, and oregano (assuming they pull through); the rectangle is my bell peppers, although I'm losing hope because they've been that size for weeks now; and in front is another Peruvian Daffodil.

The front daffodil pot is notable because something has dug through it, and I'm not even sure the bulb is still in there. Apparently skunks will root around in pots and eat bulbs. This makes me exceedingly sad, but I don't know how to check without potentially destroying it, so I'm just going to keep watering it and then maybe eventually plant some basil or something.

So that's the excitement in my life. It's amazing how much more fun this stuff is when you're a grown-up than when your parents force you to do it as a child.

I'll provide updates occasionally, and if anything exciting happens. Cross your fingers, and we may have a full-blown leather strap plant before long!

Oh, and the big news, thanks to this post by Jemima Bean is that we have a peach tree! I saw the photo of the flowers and asked her what they were, because we had some. She replied that they were peaches, and sure enough when we looked more closely at the tree, there were fuzzy baby peaches on it! Hundreds of them, actually.

The guy we bought the house from knew there was a peach tree but never remembered it bearing any fruit (probably because it used to be so shady in the yard). But now... peaches! Peaches! Peaches! We pruned the tree ruthlessly, as apparently is the way to maximize peaches, and now we are just waiting... waiting... waiting...

sad ending :-(

I just got a call from the kind people at the hummingbird rescue. The bird died. Apparently she had a back injury. So maybe it was a collision after all.

Nature is so mean sometimes!

Poor little thing.

On the first day of Christmas...

(I began this post yesterday and I'm finishing it this morning. I have regained feeling in my hand, you'll be happy to know.)

Okay, so starting today (yesterday!), I'm going to post in one or both of my blogs every day until Christmas. True, it doesn't make any sense. I'm really busy and I just get crankier all the time and right now I can't even feel my right hand because I was applying Ben-Gay to the husb's poor aching back (Guitar Hero really does a number on those of us with largely sedentary lifestyles).

But I love this season so I'll give it a try.

And what's more, I'll use that song to add a challenging theme to my posts.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... (one numb hand) ...a partridge in a pear tree.

Okay, a little Googling has revealed that everyone wants to claim the song's meaning for their own purposes. The prevailing theory is that the partridge is Jesus and the pear tree is the cross. But there are bird watchers who claim the first line is actually "a partridge in a [bastardization of the French word for partridge]". So now we have songs about bird pregnancy to warm our hearts this holiday season.

Well, speaking of bird pregnancy, let's reflect on one of the most precious and heart-rending experiences of my 2007: the house finches on the balcony.

In March, we hung up some hanging plants and soon realized that a pair of house finches had chosen one as their home (we realized this when the husb tried to move the plant and a bird flew out at his face, ha ha ha). They laid some eggs. The eggs hatched to babies.



All the while, things were getting kind of dire because we couldn't water the plant and it was starting to get leafbare (new word alert!). That was also during the time of massive windstorms sweeping through Southern California, and as we are on a hillside, we watched the hanging plant swing and twirl in the wind with a great deal of fear in our hearts.

Finally, we completely rearranged the balcony furniture so we could hang the plant from the tile-top table, from which we removed several tiles to make this work. Then we sat and watched for the agonizing few minutes when the parents sat on the railing, looking up at the spot where the plant had hung. They searched the entire ceiling of the balcony. It was the cutest and most suspenseful thing I've ever seen. Finally, the mother was like, "Oh, DUH!" and flew right down to the plant in its new lower spot.



In the new location, I was able to wait until Mum and Dad were away and snap some very good photos (one of which was on another Animal Planet show my company produced, although they had to say it was taken by "Winston Schmidt", since they'd already used another photo I took, although apparently Jeff Corwin made fun of the first photo when he had to introduce it... it was a picture of a lizard).



But I digress. (That should actually be the name of this blog.)

Anyway, the ending is sad. Too sad for Christmas. Let's just say that thanks to a nasty scrub jay who'd been terrorizing the backyard (including the hawks who'd nested in the Eucalyptus across the street), I came home one day to find no partridges in my pear tree.

I learned a lesson about hanging plants: don't have them.

In fact, that's our moral today: hanging plants will always break your heart.



Happy holidays!

PS - Delaying this post a day brings us down to 11 days of Christmas, so maybe I'll run over into Boxing Day.

A bit of this and a bit of that and a song about birds.

You know you were cut out for a life of luxury when nature creates you with a built-in sleep mask.

Last night I dreamed that I got to see the cover of my book. It looked like a Dr. Phil book -- a red background with a photo on the front, and the title at the bottom in a very conservative gold/brown print. I immediately freaked out and started suggesting changes. In my dream, I even explained the Photoshop techniques for achieving the end I had in mind. It was probably a pretty cool cover.

My title is probably changing, but more on that later.

I am off and writing on the next book. This one is different; I was trying to decide third person or first, and I settled on first person present tense. It fits the character and her situation, I think. I feel like I'm writing without a net, but I think that's how I always feel. I am also going to do a little more mapping out of this book than I usually do, but that will come in the near future. I need to get inside the character's head for a while first.

Dog show is in progress once more. It's funny, because there are other shows at my company, and some producer from another show said something jokey about the dog shows. This person was immediately shut down (as the tale was told to me, at least). The thing is, doing something 20+ times does not make it easier -- not if you want every show to be better than the last. It makes it more challenging. You are always setting out to conquer your previous effort.

Thanks for all the bird sympathy. A friend at work, on hearing about the birds, said, "Oh, I have a great quote for you." I thought it might be something like Spring is a time when life renews, and new life faces adversity and triumphs etc. etc. etc. No, her quote was something like Spring is cruel to the weak and unfit or something. It made me laugh.

I think the Indigo Girls actually said it better.

Fly Away

Fly away little bird
Any place in this open mouthed world
Begs to be fed like a bed that beckons you, but you won't rest
Everyone's got a need to go
Most of us stick with our row to hoe
But not you, you're the black crow
With a straight line, and no time
For the birds of prey who wreck your nest
Twice your size steal your best
They set you on this course of your collision

I am a stop along your way
I am the words you'll never say
I crossed the great beyond of fear
I opened my eyes and saw us there, what a view
You went there too

Fly away little bird
Find the song in you that no one's heard
Strenghthen your wings as you sing your solo flight
Through this short life
Everyone's got a deep regret
We try to ground ourselves to forget
But your race to the end is neck and neck
You love them, you love them not
The birds of prey who wreck your nest,
Twice your size steal your best
They set you on this course of your collision

I am a stop along your way
I am the words you'll never say
I crossed the great beyond of fear
Opened my eyes and saw us there, what a view
And you went there too

But all along your chosen path are
Window panes and sheets of glass
That you won't see
You fly too fast
One day it will be over

Fly away little bird
The saddest song I ever heard
Was the one I wrote you in my heart
That never made it to the world.

The secret comfort of the writer.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon involved in gnashing teeth and tearing hair. A scrub jay (yes, it is blue, and it is a jay, but it is not a blue jay) got my baby birds. My precious little tweets. I was not a happy camper. It was not a good day in my house.

I won't start categorizing events in terms of how tragic they are or aren't. The fact is, a lot of baby birds don't make it to adulthood, and a lot worse things happen in the world. They have even happened to me. Over the past few years, I have lost some optimism about the nature of humanity.

But here is the exquisite and terrible secret of the writer:

That while the mind and heart are overwrought, the keen observer backs away and observes. And it is impossible not to think, at some point, "What can I use this for?"

Which character will inherit this pain? What situation will grow from this betrayal? What shocking moment will be rendered with more truth because I have hurt today?

And like the badbadbad good feeling of giving up and scratching a mosquito bite, there's a squeak of something -- not gladness, but maybe a pessimistic smugness. Maybe it's a kind of hope. Because if you are the type to assign meaning to the things that happen to you, what is a more impertinent reply to pain than to steal from it immediately and use it for your own devices? What better way to tell the universe that you are still standing?

It was only a quartet of nestlings, but something in their sudden absence hit a nerve.

But something burns on, yes?