I just finished writing Year of the Dog ! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet: “Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday. The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt. She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway. “Can ...
Captain's Log, Stardate 08.23.2010
We started composting our vegetable scraps a loooooong time ago and it has finally become actual compost as opposed to “unidentifiable dirty objects in the compost bin.”
And today we finally used our very own compost! I wanted to plant chamomile seeds, so I picked a sunny section of the yard and Captain Caffeine laid down the compost.
Here's Captain Caffeine laying down the compost for me.
We found lots of non compost stuff in the compost. I think this is a fruit sticker.
You can see a piece of plastic that somehow got into the compost, too.
The compost formed large chunks that kind of look like horse turds, no?
You can see the fragments of old credit cards from our shredder. I dumped the shredded paper into the compost without realizing Captain Caffeine had shredded a card.
And we couldn't garden without Snickers, Defender of the Backyard. Here she is, thinking she has seen a squirrel. I say "thinking" because often she rushes the fence when there is nothing there.
I encourage her to chase the squirrels, because it scares them and they're less likely to drop into the backyard to dig up my plants (they still do, when she's not in the yard, but it's just less often than normal).
We also needed to fence the area off because the #$$#^@ squirrels always dig up my potting soil when I plant something, and I figured they’d probably throw a party in our rich compost. So Captain Caffeine found this plastic chicken wire fencing and stakes to fence off my chamomile.
I sowed my seeds and watered and now let’s see if they grow! Considering my notorious black thumb I’m not sure how they’ll do, so I sowed something like 600 seeds just for good measure.
We started composting our vegetable scraps a loooooong time ago and it has finally become actual compost as opposed to “unidentifiable dirty objects in the compost bin.”
And today we finally used our very own compost! I wanted to plant chamomile seeds, so I picked a sunny section of the yard and Captain Caffeine laid down the compost.
We found lots of non compost stuff in the compost. I think this is a fruit sticker.
The compost formed large chunks that kind of look like horse turds, no?
And we couldn't garden without Snickers, Defender of the Backyard. Here she is, thinking she has seen a squirrel. I say "thinking" because often she rushes the fence when there is nothing there.
I encourage her to chase the squirrels, because it scares them and they're less likely to drop into the backyard to dig up my plants (they still do, when she's not in the yard, but it's just less often than normal).
We also needed to fence the area off because the #$$#^@ squirrels always dig up my potting soil when I plant something, and I figured they’d probably throw a party in our rich compost. So Captain Caffeine found this plastic chicken wire fencing and stakes to fence off my chamomile.
I sowed my seeds and watered and now let’s see if they grow! Considering my notorious black thumb I’m not sure how they’ll do, so I sowed something like 600 seeds just for good measure.
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