Tough Luck – June 23, 2024

5 minutes

graphx spwilcen

The last couple weeks my visits to WP have been infrequent, my posts rarer.  Without going into boring detail, let me remind I’ve been working on several outside projects. All in stages of completion, but by no means wrapped. Projects which I’d hoped would signal the end of major new undertakings, to be put to bed so I could devote time to writing without interruption.  Uh, nope. In light of almost-complete outside revamp/repair/installs, at least three new projects now make absolute sense.  Were I rich and younger [had the loose capital and the energy to mount new projects] I’d give them a go this year, but they will likely wait for spring next year. Something to anticipate.  Yippee! [In truth, two of three are my ideas, the third, Boss and I have discussed and dismissed and discussed and dismissed, but we agree it would be a good thing to go after.]

The Large Lady is not waiting backstage to make her entrance. Closing projects and next spring’s likely new ones aside, if only for myself, I should restate a declaration I made a few scant months ago: my next project will all require only balsa, feathers, helium, marshmallows, and cotton candy for materials. This spring and summer everything has been heavy, bulky, awkward, and of course, expensive.  Um, again, unh, nope. I can manage two of the three new ones but heavy lifting is involved. The third requires much research and professional sourcing (I think).]

This last week, here as elsewhere, we’ve had tremendous heat.  One afternoon, my outside sensor telegraphed 108 degrees. Not seeing any air temperature report from anywhere else near that, I’d disbelieve it, but that sensor has always been pretty accurate to date. Needless to say, my personality one dictating whatever [foolish] goal I set for my workday, barring declaration of war or a bad case of outhouse blues, it must be completed, I overexerted. More than once. Stupid. I was hydrating [sloshed like a half-full milk pail], resting [portable chair positioned ‘neath the shade of the big maple and used regularly], but the heat and insufferable humidity got to me.  Which meant the next day I paid for it, including a case of genuine outhouse blues, and that curiously a bit of horse-cart,  but believe me, uncomfortable.

Day before yesterday I played stupid [a role I am marvelously adept at] and took it again too far.  Sopping wet from sweat, I kept plugging away.  Yesterday someone paid dearly.  Heat exhaustion is a slow recovery. Hopefully, “Stupid” has learned his lesson [anyone care to make book?] and will be even more cautious. 

Ma Nature helped me today. I don’t mind a bit of high heat [ask me about stepping off the transport aircraft in Midwest City, 1966, first PCS with Uncle Chuck’s USAF, one hundred seventeen degrees air temp] but accompanying high humidity just literally [can I use that word properly here?] chokes the breath out of you. Fortunately, with a new and expanded garden plot, most days of debilitating heat are followed by decent evening rain.  The only real garden casualties are transplants and succulent, leafy veggies, which are crisped as if in an air fryer.

Today, overnight rains left the new asparagus and compost bed enclosure too damp to work.  You can’t work decking after a rain either.  With no need to water except pots on the deck, I’ve been forced to take another day off.

Gave a look at my “Ramblings” Working Folder.  What’s there has been idle so long nothing recreates the blush of inspiration [or they stink, stank, stunk to begin with]. I dare not open a working novella or serious poemetric piece or this year’s outside work will suddenly become part of next year’s playlist.

So anyone [anyone, Ferris, anyone?] looking for resumption of regular posts [more so for the occasional smidge of fiction] will have to wait a bit longer. Until everything outside is wrapped and/or I learn how to better manage my time so I can regularly sit down to uninterrupted keyboard time.

Better time management would be a durned good idea. A fall project just hit the “to-do” [more accurately – “Wanna Do”] list.  With expanded garden space, Master Gardener Boss has so many varieties of herbs, her “harvest” is taking over the kitchen and dining room [now and again even the living room] for air drying and packaging prep. She’s out of space in the cupboard and the downstairs pantry; using the otherwise wasted wall space in the staircase “tunnel” to the basement for shelving to organize all her seasonings, extracts, salves, balms, tonics, infusions, and hoo-doo boojums makes perfect sense. [Also defines a major undertaking and two or three sessions with my good buddy, Killer.] Ease of access, too.

Do ya know what stinging nettle is?  Get this: Boss sent me and sis to the swap to dig up a few plants to be potted and added to Boss’s herbal menagerie. A noxious, evil, weed.  It is reluctantly adapting to life in a pot.  Now I must paint a sign to be placed in the garden:

I’m genuinely anxious over what use she intends for this weed. Who will harvest what part of it? What chemicals need be registered when battle commences to contain the beast?

So. Still busy, busy, busy. Still infrequent.  I’ll be popping in to see how everyone is getting-on.

There.  Now. All youse guys: get out there and do some getting-on.

SP