Happy Easter. This is from yesterday. The fruiting pear and the ornamental cherry just starting to flower across the top of one of the driveways I walk through most days. The ornamental pears out front are starting to leaf out. The energy involved in this process boggles my mind as well as delights me.
The house across the street that has been empty the whole 16 years I have lived here and was full of junk is being cleaned out. There are a couple of big dumpsters on the side street. The front garden that was once clearly lovingly cared for is mostly wild though members of the extended family have come back a few times a year for a cleanup.
I know there was a family unit that lived there, a steel worker dad but when he died and the kids grew and left home, the mother went out to the coast to live but couldn’t quite let go of the house. I don’t imagine the structure faired well under all that neglect. This is the place with the three unusual Chinese date trees, Jujube trees (Ziziphus jujuba).
One wonders what comes next for the pale gray house on this corner lot.
It was possibly the anchor house on the block where there was originally a small farm. I know there was a stream slightly down the hill that now has a street over it. A busy one. There are three houses in pretty good shape from the 1880’s back when we encouraged immigration and two modern small apartment buildings on that land now.
I feel so inadequate as a gardener but still I persevere. This morning I planted the surviving sweet pea seedlings in the area I prepared with a trellis a few weeks back and fresh compost. I will put seeds in between to fill out the space if they are so inclined to grow. I do have seeds from plants that have grown in that space before so I expect they will be adapted, but who knows.
It was warm yesterday afternoon for the first time in months. Warm! Oh gosh.
A few weeks back I sprung for a monthly subscription to Anthropic Claude AI. I had been using the free version for little questions, mostly garden, plant related. I have been finding things to ask it daily and am thinking of having it build a web page for my yoga business. Something I have been thinking about for, oh, 10 years… Anyway, my wireless micraphone stopped working on Wednesday. I can teach without it but I like having the coverage and not having to project my voice.
It had done something similar last year and I was anxious now about finding the time and the patience to try to figure out how to fix something I do not understand. Reading the online instructions and trying things and going back and forth and being concerned I was going to program it all wrong this time. With time, trial and error in some inexplicable way last year I fixed it. So was alarmed it happened again.
This morning I asked Claude about what happened with the microphone. Claude said Sure! I can help; I know exactly what happened. 5 minutes later my microphone was fully operational again and I understand what I did to make it stop working.
It has also helped me figure out how on my Mac laptop I can make notes on the face of a .pdf without paying for Adobe Acrobat Pro using the built in Preview App. (I do pay for basic Adobe Acrobat.) For over a year I have been printing things out, making handwritten notes and scanning the darn thing back in and that is all so time consuming. We have one Pro license for the non-profit and I am not the one who gets to use it.
Speaking of time consuming, I need to work on the financials and get some cardio and prep for my classes next week and…
Oh well. I feel for you all in the Southern Hemisphere heading into fall. Looking at the beautiful pictures Artemis II is sending back of us all here on Earth helps remind me, no matter how nation state parochial we might get… we are all in this together.
I can think of some folks that might benefit from that message on a day like this.
Loading comments...