elainegrey | (no subject)

Hello world.

Saturday morning remained drizzly, and, even when that stopped, it was miserably humid. I came in after planting my seedling chestnut. I notice the tap root had twisted around in the pot. Poor little tree. Well, now it has room to expand, and i will probably be better off with it NOT growing to its full potential.

Salad mix seeds i planted the previous week have sprouted. I had received a bonus packet of seeds called "Mexican gherkins," and the vine has become rampant. I've doubted i'd see any cucumbers. Yesterday i finally noticed tiny fruits was puzzled. Turns out "Mexican Gherkins" are also known as "Mouse melons" as well as a bunch of other desperate branding attempts to find something more marketable than Melothria scabra. Grape-sized, watermelon-appearing, tart-cucumber tasting snackable fruits! And, apparently mildew resistant plants, which is why they survived the past wet two months when every other cucurbit has barely coped. (Well, the Seminole pumpkin in the compost thrived but didn't set fruit.) Oh, and once they create storage roots, one can lift the roots to over winter.

This coming Saturday looks less humid, so i am optimistic that i can get some other trees planted then. I'm off to a conference for a week, and when i return i expect i'll have five more plants to get in, plus six more shortly after that.

Sunday i went with my parents to a historical society presentation on dialect in North Carolina. The program was ... not as engaging as i had hoped. It was more of an advertisement for the research program and how they "give back" to communities: https://languageandlife.org/ There are youtube versions of documentaries, but still, digging around for more academic content is hard. I did find the following:

What do we know so far?

Quinoa aesthetic semiotics, Brooklyn food truck ennui locavore Banksy migas flannel put a bird on it. 8-bit DIY Odd Future Truffaut PBR gluten-free. Scenester jean shorts banh mi, letterpress iPhone Shoreditch health goth Kickstarter Bushwick forage four dollar toast street art Pitchfork pop-up. IPhone cold-pressed occupy, wolf yr hella banh mi ennui. Salvia raw denim pug, wayfarers Bushwick iPhone stumptown normcore post-ironic gentrify crucifix 8-bit vinyl YOLO.

Wait.... what?

My mom bolted out of the audience as soon as she could, escaping any introductions i may have made to folks in the room. Ah, yup, i understand that. I do the same thing.

I'm feeling fairly even, and am telling myself, "This is happy." I got to visit with my parents, i gave twisted wood from the orchard to an artist, i have worked outside and when i didn't like the weather i came inside.

I learned some years ago that i don't access my positive feelings well. I started on a exercise of defining certain situations -- like my morning tea with Christine -- as happy. It's my fight against what i was trained to do by mother: always look at the things i want to do or feel i should do and judge myself by whether they loom over me. Which they always will! So that shouldn't make me feel unhappy, or i am defining my whole life as unhappy.

So this even feeling -- it's happy. Or "happy." Whatever (It's not awe, joy, or delight.) Stake in the ground: this is happy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's cool that you gave an artist twisted wood.

I am hoping the sticks work for her -- they might have been outside long enough that fungus and insects had worked too much on them. I like thinking some of the trees we cut down will have some continued presence in the world.

That's a great thing to hear about mouse melons, which I keep failing to get planted. They are so pretty!

That's quite the bundle to know so far. :D

I hope you can find more ways to happiness. You make me grateful that I nearly always have the gift of immediacy.