The Elephant’s Child

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

I essentially quit writing earlier this year for several reasons. I broke my hand; I was busy with work, which includes much typing and was progressing much more slowly than usual due to the break; I had done no art for more than a year; and my life was very uneventful and I simply had nothing to say.

The hand has healed, mostly, although it’s still not quite as it was. I’m busier than ever with work, for which I am extremely thankful. I still haven’t done any art.

But for some reason, a couple of months ago my husband decided after 34 years of marriage that perhaps it was time to go out and do things. Social things. Visual and performing arts things.

It started late in the summer, I think. We had gone to several of the summer classic movies at the Alabama Theatre, a 1927 movie palace extravaganza in downtown Birmingham. At one of them I noticed a poster advertising a performance of the Nutcracker by the Moscow Ballet, scheduled for the Alabama late in November. I made some general comment about not having been to a live ballet since elementary school, and he asked, completely out of the blue, “Would you like to go?”

Then he started wondering about seasonal events. I started checking local calendars and setting up things for us to see and do. So far, just in the past month, we’ve

• seen an exhibition of artifacts from Pompeii: Tales of an Eruption at the Birmingham Museum of Art;
• attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Alabama Civic Chorale;
• visited an exhibition by many of Alabama’s famous folk artists, including Thornton Dial, Mose Tolliver, Nora Ezell, and Lonnie Holley;
• attended a performance of Christmas music by Colla Voce, a 30-voice ensemble, presented at a local church.

The ballet is Friday night. On Saturday night we go to another Festival of Christmas Music at Samford University. There’s another one Sunday afternoon by the Birmingham-Southern College choir, and an orchestral performance the following Sunday. I have at least one more art exhibition I want to see, The Black Madonna at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

So I will have some things to talk about for a while. I’m looking forward to comparing the various choral groups’ performances, because there are great differences even to my untrained ear.

It isn’t fiber art, but hey. I’m getting there.

Ever since YouTube became a genuine phenomenon, more and more of the blogs I read are embedding videos into their posts. Now I happen to be a curmudgeonly Luddite: I have my browser set for no animations, no ads, and no Flash unless I deliberately click on it. This means that when I view a post with an embedded YouTube I see

Note: This is not a link or embed; it’s a screen capture. Don’t try to click it.

Now in this particular case I know who Steve is (a brilliant, insightful, well-liked political blogger who died this week at a tragically young age) so I can guess what the content might be.

In many cases, though, the posts consists of a title like “For your viewing pleasure,” which is uninformative and does not inspire me to click through and watch. It takes up screen room, it takes up bandwidth, and it strikes me as being supremely lazy. When I have nothing to say, I don’t post. It seems like such a waste of effort to embed a YouTube video without comment just to have something to list on the post calendar for that day.

Okay, now I’ve had my say for the day. It was perhaps a trifle lazy, but I got it out of my system.

This morning I was released from the cast on my right hand. I still must tape my middle and ring fingers together to prevent any chance of reinjury to the break, but this is much, much better.

This is the first time I’ve ever broken a bone and there have been some major surprises involved. The first is that the break itself didn’t hurt that much. I remember being in pain right after I fell, but after a couple of minutes I was convinced it was just a bad sprain. I didn’t go get it x-rayed for more than a day, until the swelling became truly alarming. Even after it was set and casted (”casted?” is that right?) there still wasn’t much pain and I never took anything stronger than Advil.

What did astound me was how quickly my muscle strength deteriorated and especially how painful the immobilized joints became. After three weeks I was convinced that I had really bad arthritis in my fingers; the joints swelled and it hurt to try to move. My fingers became essentially useless. After another week or so, they started hurting even when I didn’t move them. Advil became my constant friend, leading (naturally) to stomach inflammation and pain.

I have fibro. I live with pain. This should not have poleaxed me like it did.

The good news from this morning, however, is that all of this is normal and to be expected. As I exercise and stretch the ligaments, the flexibility should return and the pain should eventually go away. It will still, says the ortho guy, take months before everything is back to normal, so patience is called for.

The other good news? As a dual result of not being able to cook and not being able to eat, I’ve lost about five pounds in the last six weeks. On the whole, however, I do not recommend breaking your hand as a weight-loss mechanism.

I seem to be having much more trouble with garden pests this year. The tomatoes were hit fairly early with aphids and whiteflies. Got that under control (Safer Tomato & Vegetable Insect Killer) and yesterday discovered fungus gnats in the French sorrel. Did my research and bought some Mosquito Dunks, soaked them in a barrel of water overnight, and watered the sorrel pots very thoroughly this morning with the Dunkwater.

Mosquito Dunks release Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a bacterium which kills the fungus gnat larvae. The larvae are the damaging insects; they eat the plant roots and kill them. The pesky adults fly in your face when you are near, but they don’t harm the plants.

Drink up, my little larvae. You may have gotten these plants, but now I have your number.

Contrary to popular opinion, I have not fallen off the face of the earth.

April was extremely busy. My sister and I spent two weeks in Houston at the M D Anderson Cancer Center (she has a rare type of thyroid cancer). I worked on a new website which should be launching in the next few weeks.

Oh, yeah, and I fell and broke my hand. My right hand.

I never before realized just how right-handed I am.

Cooking, everyday chores, and gardening are all extremely difficult with only one hand available (and that the weaker hand). But it’s getting easier with practice and my left hand and arm are growing stronger. I’ve learned to chop vegetables backwards and discovered that ragged trapezoids taste just as good as perfectly neat little dice, even if they don’t look as good. Yesterday, with the help of my son, I transplanted another four tomatos and six pepper plants. I got one potato barrel started. I’d planted a few of my seed potatoes into small clay flower pots when it became apparent that I was going to be out of commission for a while, and the vines were coming up strong and sturdy. They needed room! And dirt! There are still two more barrels to prepare and more vines to transplant, but I am feeling fairly good about what I’ve been able to accomplish.

I go back to the orthopedist Thursday for a follow-up. If everything is healing well I may graduate from the cast into a removable splint, which will be delightful because it’s driving me nuts not being able to wash.

Next goal: get back into the studio and figure out how to create without doing any more harm. (Left-handed rotary cutting? Um, no.)

With the gracious help of #1 son, the first batch of purchased seedlings are potted and ready. These all came from Tasteful Garden, a plant nursery near Anniston, about 60 miles east of here.

All my herbs succumbed to the heat and drought last year, so I replaced the Greek oregano, spearmint, and chocolate mint. I added a lime basil. Still want to get a lemon balm, but dill and parsley just would not grow for me last year. I killed four or five dill plants.

I got two Romaine lettuces and a couple of French sorrels. The sorrel is completely new; I’ve never even tried it but it sounded interesting.

And so far there are two types of tomatoes: Early Girl and Rutgers. I’m going to start several other, more exotic types from seed in the next few days. My reasoning is that these early tomatoes will bear by June and then go more-or-less dormant during the heat of the summer, just about the time the Heat Wave and other high-temperature plants should be beginning to fruit. We’ll see if the plan works.

Also need to start from seed: squash, peppers, and eggplants. And the Berry Bed came today, the strawberries yesterday, so those get planted this weekend.

Ack! How did it get to be spring?

After last year’s strawberry disasters (flood early in the season, then drought and heat that killed the survivors) I ordered my strawberry plants back in January to be shipped the last week of March.

Oops. Here it is the last week of March, and I don’t have a bed ready for them.

Late last week I realized this and began to panic. I picked a place for the berry bed and then started checking on renting a tiller to dig up the grass and make it ready. My husband was adamant that I was not going to run a tiller; that he and our son would do it. But they too have been so busy that there has been absolutely no time to even think about it yet.

Enter The Catalog.

Gardener’s Supply Company had this really cool raised berry bed in the catalog that arrived Saturday. Just the thing! No digging required, takes a cubic yard of soil, and can hold up to 50 plants. I can set it up by myself and get it ready for the plants. Sold! Went onto the website and ordered one. Send it 3-day express, please, because the strawberries are coming!

Ahem.

Sunday morning I got a spooky call from the Fraud Prevention department of my credit card company.

“Did you by any chance just order $1300 worth of flowers from Flowers.com?”

They denied that fraudulent charge and blocked my card. Unfortunately, that caught the order for the Berry Bed in the block as well, so when they opened today I had to call and explain what happened and make alternate payment arrangements.

Sigh. At least the credit card company realized that this was waaaaaay out of the ordinary and flagged it as suspicious.

And now my Berry Bed is on its way.

We have a new Whole Foods Market that opened in our city at the end of February. My husband and I went to visit it the first Saturday it was open, but because it was (predictably) packed to the rafters, we didn’t stay long or get much of an idea of what was there.

Today we went back. At the grand opening they’d had outdoor tables of herbs and vegetable plants from one of my favorite suppliers, The Tasteful Garden. I wanted to see if they still had them, and Dear Husband was looking for natural peanut butter. And chocolate chip cookies, but we won’t mention those.

Yes, the tables of plants were still there! We browsed outside a bit and picked up a couple of pots of flowers as well as some lime basil, some lettuce, and some fine sturdy Rutgers tomato plants. Placing these in the basket, we entered the store.

He leaned over to me and said in a low voice: “Do you get the feeling that everybody in here earns $100,000 more than we do?”

Me: “Makes me want to run right out and buy a Volvo.”

Him (snorting): “Makes me want to go buy a NASCAR t-shirt.”

This one is based on the pattern on the floor of Ely Cathedral in England, constructed by Sir Gilbert Scott during his restorations in 1870. The original labyrinth is square; I distorted the pattern to make it fit on a 4″ x 6″ postcard.

I’ve just upgraded the installation of WordPress and appear to have lost the custom features including the title and the colored background. Not to worry; just give me time to figure it out and we’ll be back in purple.