House and Garden in Everyday Ramblings

This is the street I live on that my kitchen window and bedroom windows face yesterday morning as I was coming home from the garden for the next to the last time this season. I pulled everything up and hoed the green manure. I think the park department might burlap the plots in early November. I am going to go back tomorrow morning and throw maple leaves on the bed as a mulch as they are better chemically than the oak leaves that are blanketing the whole garden now.

I have plans for next year. I learned so much. Next year I am going to make access to harvestable edible plants easier. And I will tent the chard and beets from the start, to avoid the leaf miners. And I need another kind of beets too. I think there are good varieties for the beet root. The kind I got this year, not so good for that, and a kind that is good for the leaves. Yum. And then eggplant. I am neutral on eggplant as a food, but I love the way the plant looks. Oh, shallow gardener me.

A cold frame and seedling support are next in my learning path.

I have lived here now for 12 years. Since then, the toilet, the washer and dryer, the stove and the heating unit have all been replaced. Not so, the refrigerator. I am wondering how often you all defrost your freezer. Maybe you have fancy new no frost freezers, but this is a smallish workhorse refrigerator has just been chugging along. This week I emptied everything into the big cooler and got the job done.

It is amazing how something as simple as completing a long procrastinated chore can make a person happy.

We are not going to talk about the carpets, okay, a series of chronically ill cats as well as healthy happy ones have convinced me to be glad I live alone.

Last year this time I was only teaching 2 classes a week. Now I am teaching 10. That eats into my cookie making time and energy. I have one more class to teach this week and then I get the weekend.

The morning practice is lively and fun, and I love it. I am slowly building a student base and I would like to find a way to do something like it that works in Australian and New Zealand time zones. I think I am going to take my Friday mat class to a recording only. I think once I had three live students but mostly it is one, maybe two.

I started the two weekly weightlifting sessions before Pull-Up Club. I have three more weeks of that live. It is a lot to do both. On Wednesday night I was trying to go to sleep and a whole bunch of underused muscles were firing and going hey you, hello there. So, while I am enjoying it, I am looking forward to a schedule that is more manageable.

It is going to take me a long time to get strong enough to do a Pull Up and I may never get there. Grip strength is the hardest, but strong wrists, forearms and biceps are the focus of attention. Hanging is hard. Just saying.

I don’t know what to do about my weight. Maybe nothing. I am focusing on all the things I can do but having more weight while doing it is an extra challenge. Clearly my body is the weight it wants to be. I am not obsessing about my food intake for the first time since I was maybe 12.

Everything I am doing is because I want to do it and enjoy either the way it feels or the way challenging myself feels. I know all about over exercising. It is all about driving and self-punishment. This is about the love of movement and fun stuff to know about the body. The only exception to this is the cardio. That is the have to do because of my heart and I wish I could find a way to do this that I love.

Particularly since our case rates are still high and I don’t feel safe going to the gym and winter is coming in.

Oh well. It is a nice problem to have. A privileged healthy person problem. For this I am ever so grateful.

Last updated October 23, 2021