Friday, 1 August 2025

Four Mondays 'til September.

 The perpetual popsicle box is still the most popular thing in the freezer and today I learned that I can still knead pizza dough (looking forwards towards dinnertime) with the big Kitchenaid mixer after cutting my finger quite badly trying to use a recently sharpened paring knife to separate frozen slices of Russian pumpernickel bread for my breakfast, with apple jelly, butter and a new takeout coffee because it's Friday and someone went into town and got us all some. 

I would never volunteer. I can't manage three trays of hot coffees but that's just me and I have more coffeeshop experience than all of them combined. 

Anyway, so pizzas for dinner. I'm a purist and I like to wear myself to smithereens but now finger so no. I need to change the bandaids because to my surprise and delight the fat brown squirrel that showed up to help himself to everything in my garden, from the suet feeders to the end of the cherry harvest to all of my bean plants left me a gift. 

An acorn that has become an oak tree. A Bur Oak. Do you know how hard it is to grow a tree from an acorn? I do and I only found this because he tucked it in between the hydrangeas that I propogated earlier this summer and I was weeding and tried to pull it out. It now has it's own little pot on the step and in a few years I will find a permanent spot for it but only once it's big enough to survive. 

I watered everything (again by hand, not machine. Forest fires and water restrictions keep me doing as little as possible, just to keep my perennials alive but like I said there are ten days left in the dog days of summer and so everything looks yellow and crispy and then everything will bulk up again and become lush in the fall.

We're watching Andor (the new season) and I started The Last Showgirl last night with Dunk but we turned it off a half-hour in due to the time. I don't sleep so I'm always low-energy. I want to sleep all day in the breeze but I can't and then at four I crash and then at midnight I'm wide awake and prowling the house again. Is it ever going to change?  I doubt it. 

I'm reading Braiding Sweetgrass. I'm eating avocados and zucchini and strawberries until I fear I might become a plant, only to be dropped into the earth in someone's yard to grow into a mighty tree to stand through strife and drought and natural and political disasters until someone woefully decides I need to go in favour of a glass and steel highrise. 

I think I'd rather be a seedling in a pot never to grow or advance from the place I'm in right this very minute. It seems safer this way.