Category Archives: doing it wrong

The ads that show up on social media make me so mad: especially when they are things that I actually can use. I guess in this case it was an influencer.

She had a little bit different set up but the gist was using this yellow sticky paper to attract little insects in the house.

I have a couple of plants on the window sill that have little flies and I haven’t had any luck getting rid of them.

Then I saw her video and hopped, skipped, and jumped over to Fred Meyer where I found these little yellow sticky strips and you fold them and fasten into a little plastic stick and put in the plant, and look! They really work! This was about a week’s worth. I’m bringing them to the office, too.

Recently I was talking with some people about young people no longer learning cursive writing. I don’t know if it’s everywhere or just some places. I have no strong feelings about it. They don’t need it. Make it optional.

I’m much less concerned about the loss of cursive than I am about the loss of capitalization and punctuation. But then: old lady shakes fist at clouds. The world moves on.

I wanted to look at my writing over the years so I pulled out my notebooks. The above isn’t the complete set.

I’m wondering what to do with all of these. I hate to throw them away. There’s no reason to keep them. No one is going to want to look at them. Just today looking for cursive samples — there are all kinds of notes inserted and little doodles. I’ll have to think about it.

Look at this adorable cursive for my “creative writing” assignment in seventh grade! (1977).

I really struggled to find writing samples that I could take a picture of. I wrote lots and lots and lots of weepy, angsty, damp-eyed teen garbage that even now, I am too embarrassed to show.

This is from a trip in 2002. There is a lot of 90s writing in the notebooks but see above. I had a lot of feelings that I never got tired writing about.

This is from the Hawaii trip we took at the end of last year. I don’t really write cursive anymore. It’s more of a hybrid of cursive and printing but more heavily on the printing. Every once in a while I try to slow down and write true cursive. It doesn’t come naturally at all.

It’s taken me a few weekends but yesterday I finally finished getting the garden in. Today I am sore and creaky all over.

I had previously planted peas and a few greens.

Yesterday I put in two more trellis things for green beans and bush beans. I also spread seeds for greens, carrots, beets and probably a couple of other things. This is the part of garden planting that embraces chaos. I throw out a bunch of seeds and see what happens.

The stuff already growing is potatoes from all the little shriveled potatoes that end up in the drawer. And also maybe some daikon radishes? There were also already a few pumpkins coming in. I tried to let them live but I was also pretty vigorously raking dirt around.

This is the blueberry with the most flowers. The blueberries are kinda small on this one. All the older blueberries have lots of flowers so perhaps this will be a big blueberry year.

The raspberry patch desperately needs TLC but my decrepit joints need a break today.

Last fall I bought two new blueberry plants.

We originally bought 4 around 2018 but after the great heatwave of 2021 one of them gave up the ghost.

The ones I have aren’t super productive and the birds and I think the squirrels, too, get into them.

When I was reading about blueberry plant care, the articles said that the first year you shouldn’t let them flower and make blueberries and instead let the plant get established. Since I did not know that for the first 4 plants, I wanted to do that for the new ones.

But what does that mean? Do you clip the flowers back? Pinch them?

I asked at the nursery and they told me it was fine to let them flower but if I wanted I could just pull them off. (Actually, every person I have mentioned this to told me it was fine to leave the blooms on.) The new plants are very small and don’t have a lot of flowers and I haven’t decided yet.

For the first time I also pruned the older plants, but not very much. I didn’t realize it took blueberries a while to get established. I thought I would be buried in blueberries so I could freeze some and make jam and we would just have giant bowls full of berries everywhere. Photos of blueberries when I have them.

A couple of weeks ago we had a couple of warm sunny days in a row. I told Bob we should switch from the flannel sheets. I was at work and I suggested this via text.

He texted back that he was already in the process of washing sheets and remaking the bed and we should hold out for two more weeks.

Good thing. We have had plenty of chilly nights since then and it looks more nights in the 30s next week. Maybe we’ll keep them on a little bit longer. I love fuzzy sheets. Or maybe I just love bedding because I like fresh summer sheets, too.

As a random aside, it looks like the Archive page is broken. I do not want to wade into website fixing right now. Or ever. But the archives on the sidebar work in case you need to peruse the archives.