I find myself in unfamiliar territory:
It’s the first weekend in a month that I’m not planting anything, not pulling anything out nor (the firm favorite since we signed the offer to purchase on a new house) planning our vegetable garden . The kitchen counters aren’t covered with buckets of separating whey and curd, the cheese thermometer’s quietly resting in it’s plastic holder, the food dehydrator isn’t buzzing and the vacuum sealing machine has been boxed away after the morning’s grocery shop. My hands don’t have the faint odor of sterilizer, aren’t sticky with castor sugar and the heavy-bottom pot isn’t sickly sweet with rapidly boiling jam or chutney or preserve. In fact, the house is earily peaceful.
So, with a vaguely guilty frown, I find myself lazy. Or perhaps just tired.
Having been back at work for three weeks, the year appears to be returning to normal. Deadlines loom, the to-do list at work is rapidly extending itself, the 8 hours Monday to Friday calender has filled to a third with meetings and the dreaded worry begins to set in.
I do have to remind myself that last weekend was rather busy, as was the weekend before that. Let me see, last weeked: wake up to the sound of excitedly barking dogs only to find a bag of (what appeared to be) stolen goods on top of our back wall. I phoned the police, who very co-operatively dispatched a vehicle, only to find our neighbor pearing over the back wall and very happily finding that his stolen goods were a mere 3 meters away. Of course we let them jump over (the dogs were not happy with this) and retrieve his high-fi. (We should have returned the goods on condition that they play decent music but, being fast asleep, it slipped our minds).
After that exciting start to the morning, I mowed the lawn while hubby took the maid shopping for her kids’ school stuff, made cottage cheese, washed the cars (this activity hubby instigated, I got involved in order to audit the cleaning process) and began with another gauda.
Sunday was the usual walk-in-the-park with the dogs and the rest of the day was spent on the couch.
In other words, a normal weekend.
So why am I not doing anything today? I simply don’t know. Perhaps one just gets lazy sometimes.
June 11th, 2009 - 15:34
Why not more writing? I would have liked to have left a thought about your tomatoes: Get meal worms from your sister, she has a whole tank full in her garage (for the birds).
Shall I bring some, together with the chain saw?
June 12th, 2009 - 09:13
Ok, I know I haven’t written for a while, so here goes:
We moved. Into a new house. Our own house.
It’s huge with a big garden, a pool and three bedrooms. In fact, I’m planning to turn the whole front garden into a veggie patch (patch is probably not the right word to describe an almost 300 square meter section – but I’ll stick with it for now).
We’ve got many plans for the place, plans made during late nights drinking wine and looking at the photo’s we’d taken. Some nights we’d only get through three or four and then I’d go off on a planning spree. Some nights we wouldn’t even get to eating dinner!
Now that we’re in, these plans all seem a little daunting. I dug up one bed in the front (which is currently over populated with mustard – I’m apparently not that good at distributing seeds evenly), one just outside the back door for herbs and, in a brief enthusiastic morning, helped our tenant dig one outside her back door for potatoes (please read “helped” as “did the pick, fork and spade work”). Then I was exhausted, to the point where I had to take leave from work.
I don’t think the exhaustion was entirely due to gardening, I mean please, what kind of a woes am I? No, a lot had been going on at work as well but I’m not going to dwell on that here. This is a blog for craziness and laziness, neither of which I am in the lab (certainly not the latter, my colleagues could dispute the former though). Nothing much else happened for a while, not even the blanket in the to-be solarium we put down for the cats while moving has been picked up.
It’s winter now, being June and the first frost came on May 19th. When I opened the back door for the dogs that morning and saw the terrible whiteness of the ice, I promptly decided to invest in some frost covers, which I duly purchased after leaving work early. They did help but the wind kept on blowing them off the plants. Hubby was wonderful though, he built frames for them, which made it a lot easier to keep the blankets in place (except for the kitty though, she’s in her naughty phase and likes to tear things up!). Not too much damage done and most of the plants have survived.
We also got stuck into restoring the dilapidated Wendy house out back, which we originally were going to throw out. Instead, I decided that having a grean house would be a fantastic way of keeping me out of nurseries in the spring. Besides, seeds are cheaper than seedlings. So the paint was scraped off, a new coat put on, the rust mostly removed from the window frames, a see-through roof put on and shelves from the solarium put up (once again, thanks to my wonderful husband) and, last but certainly not least, glass installed in the window frames. That last point had me wishing for kids to do all the putty kneading!
At the moment there are three different types of basil plants living out their last days in the snug, frost-free little house (these by the way are plants I’m taking care of for a colleague) as well as some winter seedlings I planted a while back. More are definitely to follow, since I’m sitting here waiting to go to the airport to fetch my mum and she’s bringing what appears to be a farm’s worth of seeds with her.
Gotta go now.