February 27th, 2007
I ordered my kitchen garden from Territorial Seed Company today. The gardening I did in Kirkland was really useful in picking stuff out this time around. From experience, I know that I just don’t like growing salad greens. In the space I have easily available, I just don’t think I can grow enough to feel like it’s worthwhile. I want enough of whatever I grow to fuel multiple meals!
So, this year I’ve ordered pumpkins, three varieties, to put in the ground in the remnants of a raised bed a previous tenant left behind. I’ll excavate it and refill it with a topsoil and soil conditioner mix. I think I should be able to fit six plants in without being too greedy. I grow pumpkins because they’re fun; I only regularly eat pumpkin in the seed form. So I have an ornamental variety, a carving variety and a seed-eating variety.
I’ve also ordered tomatoes. I don’t eat tomatoes from the grocery very much but they’re also fun to grow and I absolutely love fried green tomatoes. I have three varieties there as well, a sweet cherry tomato, a medium variety that supposedly grows very well in this area, and an heirloom variety that is supposed to be huge, tasty and ugly. They’re all going to go in some of the large pots I brought with me from Kirkland.
I also have a variety of zucchini and a variety of summer squash, which I grow because they’re fun and I love to eat them up. They also go in large pots.
Finally, I have two varieties of strawberries, an everbearing variety and an alpine. They also go in pots, although I got enough alpine seed to scatter in interesting places around the lawn; they make very very tasty groundcover and the feral ones held their own against the groundcover battle that stole our lawn in Kirkland. From experience, with the pots I have, there will never be enough everbearing at any one time for any amazing cookery, but a handful of them will make an astonishing breakfast picked straight from the vine.
I also decided to order a variety of early jalapeno. I’ve tried and tried to grow peppers every year I’ve been gardening and never succeeded but I had an unallocated medium pot and this was a variety I hadn’t tried before. Hope yadda yadda and maybe the local microclimate will be better!
The orange tree I got has a couple of fruit set, although previous sets all fell off. Since I purchased it a few weeks ago, it’s lost a lot of leaves and yesterday I trimmed off the branches it’d abandoned. The leaf-loss doesn’t worry me much because it was clearly sacrificing leaves and flowers that couldn’t get enough sunshine, from its greedy point of view. I know it’s greedy because the meyer lemon tree right next to it gets the lesser share of sunshine from that window and its pushing up new branches and preparing to bloom even on branches a foot away from the window.
I also have some basil, cilantro, parsley and chives seeded indoors at the moment. And we trimmed the heck out of the apple tree but hopefully it will still produce fruit.
Categories: Garden |
Tags: gardens | 1 Comment
February 22nd, 2007
Plus Dante is going through a ‘toddler day’. You know, the days where he throws every bit of reasonable behavior to the wind in exchange for the unbridled joy of flagrant disobedience followed up by acting like he’s all sweetness, innocence and love. I cannot WAIT until he grows out of this.
On a related note, my father mailed me my baby book and I went through it. Apparently, of my first eight words, ‘doggie’ and ‘barking’ were two of them. In fact, ‘barking’ was apparently my first word. So I guess I really have loved the hairy smelly rambunctious critters all my life. The snoring cuddly little fuckers.
Categories: Pets |
Tags: dante, Pets | 7 Comments
February 22nd, 2007
I suppose I shouldn’t beat myself up for being so low-function, since as far as web research can tell me, my pregnancy rhinitis is more severe than the congestion most pregnant women experience. I mean, maybe not and maybe I’m just a weakling. I do doubt this is worse than what anybody with allergies goes through on a seasonal basis. Sneeze sneeze cough cough hack gag blow! It’s not the worst cold I’ve ever experienced, thank God, but it’s definitely the sort of thing I might have taken a sickday for, in order to head off the worst cold I’ve ever experienced. Well, at least in terms of nasal suffering, it’s not the worst. I’m not sure I’ve ever sneezed this much before. And just think, six more months of it!
Categories: Science Experiment |
Tags: general-zod, pregnancy | 5 Comments
February 20th, 2007
Random observations, theories and speculation:
(more…)
Categories: Updates From the Void |
Tags: observations, television, theories | 7 Comments
February 19th, 2007
A middle-aged man with a middle-aged women mentions Goldshire. He explains how in Goldshire, everything is located in sensible locations. Engineering trainers. Cooking trainers! And downstairs, warlock trainers! Soon after, they leave.
Then my attention is drawn to the trio the next table over by Mr. Hubbard and philisophical machine. It’s strange stuff, a mixture of business discussion and organizational theory and emotional talk. The primary speaker is relaxed and laughing a lot. He asks a lot of questions, encouraging the small business owner to pour out his dreams while the third member of the trio, a woman, looks on. The first thing I noticed about them, when I first arrived, was the paperwork on the table: a chart and what looked like a contract and notebooks.
They’re back to Mr. Hubbard and his philosophical machine again. The businessman is so interested. He’s a self-described pessimist who used to be an optimist, who does some sort of support consulting service, and who prefers to work with charities. He used to work for Microsoft. He has a three year old.
And now they’re looking at a binder, which outlines programs and training of some sort, with pricetags attached. The businessman asks if there’s a list of benefits to the training, rather than a list of what it contains. He’s in interviewer-mode now, listening to the primary speaker explain a list of bulletpoints about his experience, and nodding with the oh-so-neutral ‘k and mm-hmm of a hardened interviewer. Maybe this is some kind of sting. I can hope. The businessman volunteered to stay until 5, earlier. Now the woman is asking questions. She’s been very quiet previously; maybe she’s an employee or partner instead of a wife?
The businessman has gone to the bathroom now. The woman confides in the primary speaker that they own everything. She’s definitely involved with the businessman in some intimate fashion, or wants to be. She’s been taking very careful notes.
*sigh* There are better things to do with my time than this. It’s educational but I’m tired, and there’s not a pen or napkin to be found (where I might scribble a handy url for somebody else to find).
Categories: Updates From the Void |
Tags: observations | 2 Comments
February 19th, 2007
OK.
I eat something. I sit around for a while because usually when I eat I’m sitting down. Then, because I’m a flake, I leap to my feet and rush off to do something more interesting. Over 50% of the time, I then pause and say, “Oooh, I don’t feel so good.” But by then, it’s too late! I make it to the bathroom, or the kitchen sink, or the lawn, or a pile of dirt. I ponder how much nutrition I’ve recieved from my tummy’s rejected contents.
There’s more! In the mornings, after getting up, even if I do it slowly, I cough a lot! All that congestion has settled into my chest and it has to come! up! And my digestive system says hey i can do that. In the first few weeks, I was queasy, which is easier to spell than nauseous, but I withstood. I was a rock. I hate vomiting. These days, less constant queasiness. More upchuck!
I don’t do any of the household maintenance tasks like laundry or vacuuming any more than I did before I was pregnant. I do the grocery shopping less. At this point I spend a lot more time thinking about the Phantom Zone than I do General Zod. I only really think about a baby in the most shallow and practical of ways, like guess we’ll have to put a crib in the spare bedroom and thank God we bought an air conditioner last summer. Oh, and I think about it when the dogs are being particularly toddler-like.
While ‘baby’ is a good shorthand for all the potential growing inside me now, it’s actually hard for me to really internalize it as a BABY, because it’s not. It’s an embryo, or maybe a fetus by now. At some point it will be able to survive outside the womb with extensive medical assistance and then it will be a baby. Though I imagine it might get an early promotion when it gets assigned an official pronoun. Or when it kicks, or any of those miraculous moments.
Mostly right now, I’m sick. And I’m aware that, at some point on the horizon, a new tiny person will join our household, and then there will be lots of sleepless nights and wrasslin’ with strollers and boob pumps and maybe even unpleasant exhausted arguments with Kevin, and eventually smiles and curiosity. And apparently the spare bedroom will transform into this tiny person’s room. And there will be small fuzzy clothes. But the only thing I really daydream about is how Hannah and Dante will react to the small infant squalling thing. Maybe I only daydream about them because they’re the only ones I can’t talk to who will definitely have an opinion?
Categories: Science Experiment |
Tags: pregnancy | 4 Comments
February 19th, 2007
I’ve been vaguely inspired to poke at some worldbuilding, though. For a different setting entirely, of course.
I have problems doing extended generalized worldbuilding for Carouselchain. It’s so very big and it doesn’t map well, what with all the mobile skylands. It has my happy-making original elemental system, and I’ve done a lot of basic metaphysics for it but I just haven’t been able to sit down and detail out a large percentage of countries and peoples. This is kind of because it’s supposed to be able to contain, well, not everything, but an awful lot. I mean, I don’t want to set things there if I’m not comfortable with the setting having flying islands and potential access to a variety of sentient nonhumans. It’s an unbounded setting, where I haven’t even answered a lot of the basic questions I make myself answer in world-creation.
So, anyhow, I’ve been working on Calizene, home of the Alexandrine (Alexandrian?) Empire and setting of the unwritten Victoria novels. Well, when I say ‘working’, I mean that I’ve been going over old notes on it, and digging up old notes on another entirely different cosmological system that I decided to integrate into it. The setting is already the victim of one integration, because I came up with two separate magical elemental systems at two different times. (These aren’t crazy new elemental systems, just an arbitrary assignment of some of the old familiars. When I say elemental systems, I think I mean ‘fundamentals of magic’)
Integrating settings is hard but I think it will ultimately make for something richer. Something I’ve been infatuated by in recent years is obscuring the cosmology. My very oldest settings all featured a world that basically understood itself. The gods were the gods, the creation of the world and the role of humanity was all stuff that was written down and understood. After all, a lot of the stuff I read was like that. Then I started believing that all the fun came when people didn’t understand the universe. In Engines of Heaven, there are only two layers of obfuscation, and tearing away one of them is the point of the story. In Carouselchain, the happy-making elemental system is obfuscated and every culture has their own imperfect understanding of how and why magic works the way it does. However, because I tell everybody who shows the slightest interest how the setting’s magic works, it’s not a very interesting tool for storytelling. It was originally designed as a game setting.
TFN (Citadel of the Sky) has, oh, around two layers of obfuscation. Possibly a few more. As with Engines of Heaven there’s a Secret of the Universe that will never show up in any written form, but that I know and use to shape the answers to various important questions. In Engines of Heaven the other veil is important and global, whereas in TFN… well, I won’t say. 
Let’s just say that TFN is a bit more complicated.
The thing is, obfuscation is hard for me. I come up with ideas I think are cool and I want to share them. The best I’ve been able to do is try to build theories around fragments of The Truth. So the more complicated The Truth is, the more theories I can come up with. I don’t think Calizene has a Secret of the Universe yet, or at least nothing I’ve come up with so far feels Secret. There are lots of lower-case secrets but they’re mostly of the ‘meant to be discussed someday’ variety. However, this may be because Calizene is most likely to have the sort of thaumaturgical physicists who dig that deep. Carouselchain is very magical but it’s fantasy-practical, Engines of Heaven is idealistic steam-punk, TFN is deconstructionist (reconstructionist?) epic. I think I’d describe Calizene as, well, for lack of a better phrase at the moment ‘old imperial gothic’.
Categories: Writing |
Tags: Writing | 1 Comment
February 14th, 2007
When I go out and eat unagi, that’s EEL BEFORE ZOD!
Categories: Updates From the Void |
Tags: general-zod, jenna | 1 Comment
February 14th, 2007
but I think I’m sick. I’ve been coughing a bit more, and having a subsequent intake-reversal. I thought that, well, I was just relapsing into the terrible morning sickness, but Raymond is staying home today because he’s ill.
This is actually a great relief. Sickness goes away. Morning sickness, on the other hand, could be with me for seven more months, if I were unlucky. Or, you know, another four weeks. And I’d been feeling better on Monday morning, too.
Not that this does much for the writing. But I persevere! What kind of establishments, retail and otherwise, does one find in really bad slums?
Categories: Updates From the Void |
Tags: Me, unanswered-questions | 2 Comments
February 12th, 2007
I finally feel comfortable explaining why.
I’m pregnant! Today we had an ultrasound that placed me 9 1/2 weeks pregnant, due September 11 (just as I expected), a little over 1 inch long and a heartbeat of 166 beats per minute.
Oh yes, lots of symptoms. Exhaustion. Morning sickness since, oh, four weeks? Nearly constant morning sickness. Luckily I’m very attuned to what I feel like eating and careful listening has allowed me to neither gain nor lose any weight. Cheese is the very best.
Also, sniffly sneezing coughing so you can’t sleep thingie. Basically, a constant cold. And I sleep in 4-5 hour stints, twice a day, with a 2 hour nap sometime in there, usually.
My story is about 3/5 done, in terms of major events? It shall definitely be done by next Friday, and maybe even by Wednesday. Oddly, I’d been beating myself up about not finishing it until just now, when I planned out the sentence: babies are on an unpredictable schedule and thus so am I!
It’s been really hard not sharing the utter misery of the past month and a half with the world. But a heartbeat has been confirmed, and so now I’m ready to share the ups and downs with every stranger who happens by.
The developing embryo has been named General Zod. It dwells, of course, in the Phantom Zone. Blame Michelle.
Categories: Science Experiment, Writing |
Tags: general-zod, pregnancy, Writing | 15 Comments
