My Fresh Hell
Life in Scribbletown.

The First Frost

2006-10-16

Some days I�m just an awful person. Not on purpose, it just happens. I�m also a bit absentminded. Remember how, not long ago, I showed up at my friend�s baby shower a week early? With food, gifts and family? Yeah. Well, this weekend I�d been invited to a wedding reception/party. Not the wedding itself, mind you. Just the reception. So, I�m a Tier Two friend in this case. But, the important thing here is that I forgot. I forgot all about it. And now I have to send a �sorry� e-mail. And anything I say will sound made up. Sigh. My friend and I are not very close these days. Clearly. Since she changed jobs, found a new beau (after a difficult divorce), bought a house and inherited two now-step-sons, we�ve moved apart. But, still. I owe her something. I�m just afraid whatever I say will sound false. Perhaps I shouldn�t worry too much. It�s not like she�s been touch since March when they all came out for lunch. It�s kind of sad, though, to see a friend slip away, to suddenly have less in common when in fact, we have more. Having her step-sons in her house, at least part-time, has given her a sense of what life is like with children: unpredictable. Plans do not always go as planned. Brain cells are killed off with astonishing speed. I don�t know. I guess I�ll say something. I can't not say anything. It�s embarrassing though. I always seem to have to make excuses for forgetting and for not wanting to do things that I don�t want to do. Or, for not doing things I do want to do only everything � with two children � is difficult. And there is a limit to how much difficulty I can take on any given day. We considered going the National Folk Festival downtown. But, I decided not to. I really didn�t want to drive almost an hour (each way), try to find a parking spot or worse, park in a satellite lot and be bussed in, wander around in enormous crowds of people and then truck us all home again, tired and cranky. Perhaps. Plus nothing started until noon each day so any chance of a nap would be out the window. As it happened, no naps were taken anyway. Maybe next year we�ll go. Red will be nearly 3 � and it all might be a little easier to manage.

Boy, that's quite a paragraph.

Saturday opened with frost. The first frost. On the day I�d planned to pull up the remaining basil plants and make the final batches of pesto. Nature beat me by a day and pretty much made off with my basil. I managed to salvage enough leaves for one large batch but I�d been hoping for a lot more.

With that sign, I knew it was time to dismantle the vegetable garden for the season. The only thing remaining now are the huge marigold plants which are just too pretty (still) and impressive to do anything as impertinent as rip them bodily from the ground. I�ll let them go gently into that good night, I think. The spinach and radishes, under insect (groundhog) coverings, are doing quite well and now that the weather has turned, should grow quite nicely, I hope. Next weekend, I need to plant the winter ground cover. I think I bought hairy vetch. I can�t remember.

The hibiscus was brought in and will live in the art/laundry room until next May, at least. I guess it�s time to buy some pansies for the front planters so they don�t look so bare when all the flowers finally die. They aren�t there yet and I�m not about to prematurely pull them up until they are black dead sticks.

So, we spent the weekend mostly around the house. The girls are apparently in hibernation mode as they�re eating twice as much food as normal. Dusty, even after dinner, will claim to be hungry and will eat two or three times again until bedtime. I�m sure if we could rig up some intravenous feeding apparatus, she could continue to receive nourishment while she sleeps.

And Red is on one of those raw food diets. The only way she�ll eat vegetables if it they�re raw. She�ll eat green beans while I�m snapping off the ends in preparation for cooking them but she won�t touch them once they're cooked. She also ate chunks of uncooked sweet potato while I chopped it up for a hominy chili I made yesterday. But, offer her a cooked piece of sweet potato and, �Bleeh!� is the response I get. At least she�ll eat them in some form. Sigh the Second.

I have more to tell but I�ll save it for later.

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9:37 a.m. ::
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