This year’s garden
Really, I don’t want to talk about the garden this year.
On dressing one’s age
I was at the thrift store and a man pulled out a t-shirt and showed it to his friend. It had some TV-show-related meme on it. He saw me looking at him and said “Maybe if I were a bit younger. After you hit 70 it doesn’t seem so cute.” I said, “yeah, I’m feeling it at 53.*” “What I wouldn’t give…” he said.
* Note that I am 52 until November 4, but I often start rounding my age up in March after Shanon’s birthday.
A friend at work told me a story about when he had just turned 30 and was self-conscious about his age (“what I wouldn’t give…”). He was going to see the noise band Lightning Bolt play a house show. He got dressed, put on a new shirt, asked his S.O., “do I look OK for this show,” and she was apparently like, “sure.”
He gets to the show way early and there’s an opening band playing, so he asks the guy at the door when Lighting Bolt is going to play. “Why?” the guy asks him, “are you the landlord?”
This year’s garden, part two
OK, fine, let’s talk about the garden.
I had two major problems with the garden this year. June was the wettest month ever in Colorado Springs, and you’d think that would be a good thing for a garden. The problem is that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and the weeds grew like, well, weeds and choked out the vegetable plants.
The other major problem I had was the nerve pain that I wrote about here before. The pain in my shoulder and arm meant that I really wasn’t able to pull weeds, and most of the vegetable garden became completely overgrown. We got three (3) tomatoes from I think six plants, maybe one kinda not-nice side dish of green beans. I had higher hopes for the pumpkins but there’s only one that attained a decent size and it’s not well-formed so it will probably go to Han to make soup.
The one bright spot was the circular herb garden I put in the middle of the back yard where Rickert has ruined all the grass. Here’s a photo just after the initial planting.
And here it is much later in the season when the weeds have run rampant, but the mint, basil, sage, oregano, parsley, thyme have all done well. In the back are arugula that bolted and looked kind of pretty with the tiny white flowers so I left them alone.
The photo below shows some of the basil and mint harvest. The mint was kinda nasty, I might try another variety next year. I dried the basil, thyme, oregano and the sage for cooking and burning. The peppers did pretty well this year. We ate some of them fresh and I dried a lot of the cayenne peppers to use this winter.
No more Before
You will probably be happy to know that I returned the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight DVDs to the library (after re-watching Midnight with the commentary by Delpy, Hawke, and Linklater, which I recommend) and don’t plan on writing any more about it. I won’t tell you how I watched Delpy’s prior movie, Three Colors: White and realized there was a reference to that film in Sunrise. I won’t bother you with my screenplay for Before Dinner, in which Jesse and Celine spend 90 minutes walking around Austin’s Central Market talking about love, sex, and what they can fix for dinner that everyone in the family will actually eat. And I certainly won’t sketch out my plans for a Before Cinematic Universe where we get a tragic film from the point of view of Jesse’s first wife; a screwball comedy featuring Emily, the lady from the bookstore that Jesse totally had sex with; and a limited-run prestige TV show featuring the Wilmington’s Cow actors putting on a production of Waiting for Godot. We have moved on.