Limp Flowers & Cats
Monday has arrived, and signals the end of The Socialist’s semester break. The first eight weeks of his summer schedule have him teaching at the college Monday through Thursday nights. I’m not sure I’d like this as a long-term schedule, but I have to admit that I’m looking forward to having early summer evenings to myself. I have lots of little projects that require attention, and I’ll also get a chance to get some serious Snood time in.
I’ve discovered why some of my pictures have stopped displaying. My older pictures have been coded using the original “deardiary” URL. Newer ones have the current “hamipiks” URL. While the deardiary pics displayed for a while, it seems that sometime in the past couple of weeks the links no longer function. I dread having to go back and recode so many entries, but unless DD admin has an easy fix for that, this is exactly what I’m going to have to do. I’m pleased I finally figured out what was happening; it was starting to drive me nuts why some pictures would display while others wouldn’t.
I arrived to a catastrophe of less than epic proportions when I pulled into work this morning. I have the doorway and window to my office dressed with pansies, and the poor unfortunates didn’t make it through this last weekend, which turned out to be very hot. I watered them when I left work on Friday, but it apparently was insufficient to carry them for a full two days in 90-degree heat (32 degrees Celsius for my metric friends). When I arrived the pink and maroon pansies in the window box were crispified. The purple and bronze johnny-jump-ups were a little better on my doorstep, but even those may have been fried past redemption. I watered them heavily before the sun hit them, and the johnny-jump-ups have perked up a bit, but the pansies remain in their dead soldier positions for the most part. If this heat keeps up, I’m going to have to replace these with cacti for my window box!
Speaking of flowers, Audrey II’s kith and kin are doing gangbusters. Most of the buds on the larger of the two groupings are now open and the mix of purple and white flowers is rather impressive. Only the purple blooms on the smaller grouping have opened, but they are of the double-petaled “cup and saucer” variety and stand alone quite nicely. My primroses, on the other hand, have stopped sending forth new buds and look for all the world like slightly fuzzy leaf lettuce. It will soon be time to put them out of my misery and put the summer garden in. Only about a third of my sunflowers came up in the graveled area by the fence, but I’ve got more than enough sunflower sproutlings in the garden area with the Canterbury Bells to fill in the dead spots. I’m going to have to find a place for all the sunflower sprouts … I don’t think I could bear to pinch even one off. I’ll have to wait and see how well they survive being transplanted, and I’m not going to transplant them until they are at least six inches high. That means that most of them still have three to four inches to go before I introduce them to their final home along the fence.
My catnip has not sprouted as well as I would have liked, and I may have to start some more chive seeds as well. The parsley is coming up just fine though, and the cilantro seedlings I was given seem to have never noticed that they were transplanted from a garden twenty-some-odd miles away. It isn’t much, but it’s still a garden.
I need to come up with some sort of treat to bring into work for my department tomorrow. Everybody else brings in cake or cookies, with the occasional donuts to punctuate the monotony. I want to do something different but two weeks’ worth of thinking hasn’t brought me to any epiphanies regarding this. Looks like I’ll be hitting “Joy of Cooking” when I get home tonight, if inspiration fails to strike me before then.
Meanwhile, as I told someone else this morning, the cats are draped around the apartment like so many oddly-shaped limp dishrags. I have the fan directly on me in the bedroom, but it’s getting to the point where all it’s doing is pushing around hot air. I refuse to turn the air-conditioning on yet, either in the apartment or the car. It’s only May 24th, for crying out loud! Besides, with gas now well over two dollars per gallon in these parts, and with my little Prius gettng 47 miles per gallon right now (if I leave the air conditioning off), I have a hard time justifying anything other than just rolling the windows down and going with the flow.
I begin to miss winter.