Adventures in Learn By Doing in Everyday Ramblings

This is a graft of two fruit trees in bloom from a few days back. It mostly drops a kind of crabapple in the early fall. Our ornamental cherries are almost done blooming as they push out beautiful new leaves. The ground is covered with wet pink blossoms because we finally had a little rain.

Snooping around the garden this morning I noticed the guy two plots over has the same blueberry as I discovered in my plot but his is in a pot. I cut back the dead growth this morning and weeded around the base.

Most of my carrot starts have more than one carrot growing and I am wondering if I need to separate them or that is just the kind of start I bought. I need to investigate.

Yesterday Mrs. Sherlock and Frieda and I went to the estate garden south of here that has the amazing wisteria. The garden was closed! It is closed Saturday and Sunday. The plan is to go back next Monday. We couldn’t go to the Japanese Garden this morning because poor Mr. Sherlock is having more work done to prepare for dentures.

We are all going next Monday and after that we shall go stroll around the estate garden as well.

We had a nice long walk in a nearby state park instead. A couple of the bridges for the creek in the ravine at the bottom of the park were seriously damaged by falling trees during the horrid ice storm in February and have not been repaired. This park features a beautiful array of trilliums. They are just past their prime. Fun fact, it takes seven years for a trillium to flower if grown from a seed.

I sowed my early girl tomato seeds here at home yesterday and learned a lot but will be truly surprised if any of them sprout. The tomato seeds are so small! I tipped a few of the seed pots over in trying to soak them and I think I lost the seeds.

I have more seed pots and will get another type of tomato seed.

Speaking of getting things, yesterday after our walk I realized it wasn’t going to rain for a few hours and I had time, I went to the grocery store both ways, double masked, on the bus. The whole thing took 45 minutes!

Friday, I walked to the garden store (it is about 3.5 miles) with a mask in my hand. I looked at the charts being published and if you are alone, fully vaccinated and stay a fair distance away (six feet) from others, you can be active outside.

It was like heaven climbing that road without a mask. I have adapted and done that walk/hike close to 70 times in the last year, or some version of it, always with at least one mask on. When I got to the store I double masked up before I went inside and on the way home on the bus.

We wore masks hiking yesterday, it is a requirement of where we were, but not in the car. And today I am in the process of getting a confirmation for a haircut appointment with a single guy in a salon. My hair is so heavy! I am just going to get some of the weight off and have it evened out. It has been 14 months for me. I will wear a mask.

So many people I know are struggling with lost or thinning hair, I feel like my frizz and hang problem is one first world one. But you know…if it is your hair…

Our local League of Women Voters did a Police Accountability Report, that they published recently. I watched a very good panel discussion on it week before last and tomorrow my study group makes recommendations for a position on it. I am reading it in half hour increments. It is a hard and profoundly disturbing read. And some of the study questions are deeply challenging.

But that is what democracy requires. And I am grateful for all the work people have put in on this so far.

Oh, and one other thing…remember my job and my age and sex discrimination reporting that hit a humiliating brick wall? Well things got so bad in a public way this last year that the institution for which I used to work is now spending a whole bucket of change to have Eric Holder (and his firm) to come in and investigate and make recommendations.

I am so very glad I am out of there, but it still feels good to have that outside verification of how bad it was at work as I happily move through my slightly less restricted days in retirement.

Last updated April 26, 2021