Black Friday: How We Made It Through

I don't know what possessed me.  I had the carpet cleaners come Wednesday evening.  We went to my in-laws Thursday for lunch.  And when we got home in the late afternoon, I decided to sell my car on craigslist.  Not quite realizing that it might conflict with the dinner for 10 I'd planned on Friday.

Stand back, please!

So in between simmering and stirring, sweeping and dusting, moving furniture, chopping onions and setting tables, I reached out for a bit of good old-fashioned spirits, in the form of sangria.  It was a cold, windy, blustery day, but a batch of sangria always makes it feel like summer.  Here's the recipe:

60 ml (2 ounces) brandy
.5  liter (or about 2 cups) Triple Sec
1 liter (34 ounces) Tom Collins mix
1-1.5 liters red wine (1-2 bottles)
1 orange, thinly sliced
2 apples, cored and thinly sliced

Combine and pour over ice in pitchers.  Apply as needed to stressful day.  As for craigslist, you're on your own!

My Gardening Errors

Recently,  I was trimming the fig ivy back from the windows (again!) and it occurred to me that I keep repeating the same mistakes.  When I reflect on my habits as a gardener, I see that my personality flaws determine, to a large extent, what I'm up to in the garden.

We'll stick to the garden in this discussion: don't worry.  There won't be too much psychodrama!

I have trouble in my garden with the same things, time and again, mainly because I overestimate the extent of my own power to control things.  That fig ivy?  I was warned.  But no!  I believed I could easily keep it in check.  The Norfolk Island Pine, that died a horrible death in this winter's freeze?  I knew it was a Zone 10 plant, but I thought I could keep it warm, up close by the brick wall on the south side of my house.  That pretty calibrachoa basket, resembling tiny baby petunias?  I knew it wasn't a heat-tolerant plant, but I SWORE I could keep it alive, in the partial shade under a big maple tree.  Not.  You see where I'm headed with this, don't you?  The large tree planted too close to the fence?  The plants getting too much sun, or too much shade, or too much water, or not enough water?  I did all that on purpose, really.

Norfolk Island Pine - Pre-freeze!

I could go on and on, but I won't.  I'll just say that I'm trying to escape this Gardener's Groundhog Day in which I find myself.  Trying to accept the fact that I am not, after all, in charge of the whole wide world.  (At least not the outside world!)

Trying To Work Up Some Gratitude

For the rain, that is.  It really seems like it's rained every single day this summer, though I know that can't be true.  My typical reaction to weather: It's never been this hot/cold/wet/dry/windy/still before!  Then I look back at my notes, and I realize it's always that bad.  Always.  Today, it's the rain, the soggy soil, the monstrous mosquitoes.  We're running about 4 inches ahead of our normal rainfall. 

 (Photo: Thomas Bush)

But last year, we were ten inches behind, and almost the entire state of Texas was in a severe drought.  Crops withered on the vine, lawns turned brown and stayed that way, massive old pecans gave up the ghost and pine trees everywhere fell victim to the pine bark beetle.  It's always something.

 (Photo: Rolf Bauer)

I'm reminded of Henry Mitchell, who writes in The Essential Earthman:

I detect an unwholesome strain in gardeners here, who keep forgetting how very favorable our climate is, and who seem almost on the verge of ingratitude.  Disaster, they must learn, is the normal state of any garden, but every time  there is wholesale ruin we start sounding off -- gardeners here -- as if it were terribly unjust.  Go to any of those paradise-type gardens elsewhere, however, and see what they put up with in the way of weather, and you will stop whimpering.  What is needed around here is more grit in gardeners.

He continues:

It is not nice to garden anywhere.  Everywhere there are violent winds, startling once-per-five-centuries floods, unprecedented droughts, record-setting freezes, abusive and blasting heats never known before.  There is no place, no garden, where these terrible things do not drive gardeners mad.

from "On the Defiance of Gardeners," by Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman, ©1981, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, New York

(Photo: Jelena Loncar)

I'm trying.  Gratitude.  Grit.  Hmm.

I Can't Help It

I laughed out loud while reading this.  From an article called "Engineers and Scientists: Similarities and Differences," written by Dr. Henry Petrowski, published in the Summer 2010 issue of The Bent of Tau Beta Pi:

He writes that everything made by scientists and engineers is in some way natural, because everything that exists in our world follows natural laws.

Cotton may be said to be a natural fabric, but cotton shirts do not occur in nature.  They are the product of harvesting, ginning, dying, spinning, weaving, sewing, and, perhaps the most unnatural of all processes,  marketing. If cotton feels better to wear than polyester, then so be it, but it is not necessarily because cotton is more natural than polyester.