A Moveable Garden

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

• Weather

Weather seemed seasonable, with highs temperatures from 37.4°F to 21.0°F, averaging 29.6°F, and lows from 5.7°F to 25.5°F, averaging 13.9°F. No precipitation until late Sunday afternoon (19th), when we got about 4 inches from then until the wee hours of Monday morning.

• Beginnings/Firsts

My permaculture group began reading and discussing Ed Yong’s book An Immense World (2022) this week.

• Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

By row from top: mourning dove feather + Birdfy display with Carolina wren and white-breasted nuthatch; cardinal pair + two goldfinches, one in flight; goldfinch and purple finch + purple finch; Carolina wren + Carolina wren and goldfinch; goldfinch + opossum; male downy woodpecker + mourning dove; tufted titmouse + male downy woodpecker; white-breasted nuthatch + dark-eyed junco; female cardinal + male cardinal; red fox in snow.

• Wandering 

We took in-town walks on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday, and I took a longer walk on Friday. We walked around the lake on Tuesday. I didn’t wander far from home this week. Here’s some of what was seen on the walks:

in-town: cedar waxwings (flock and two), robin, two more cedar waxwings in another location, child’s book in snow

lake

• Curiosity & Discoveries

We saw flocks of cedar waxwings while walking in town on Monday and on Thursday (see above), and we saw more eastern bluebirds while walking in town on Sunday.

I enjoyed this week’s Virtual Birding (via Maine Audubon) on Thursday night. Forty of us on Zoom watched birds at feeders in Nokomis, FL (no pics), near Sedona, AZ (Woodhouse’s scrub jay; acorn woodpecker), at Cornell’s set-up on Ontario CN (flock redpolls, flock evening grosbeaks), near Zyweic, Poland (no pics), and in Aalborg, Denmark (magpie + ring-necked pheasant) .

• Creating

Creating hygge in the late afternoons and evenings with our white, green, and blue fairy lights in the windows, the colourful strip lights, the little juniper Christmas tree lit up, and the woodstove fire crackling as the temps dip into single digits.

• Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I got my second shingles shot on Friday morning around 10:30, and about 10 hours later, after dinner, I started to feel fluish (chills, unremitting headache, sleepy), and even though I took 2 Ibuprofen PM, I still had a bad night’s sleep. (This does not happen at all for me with Covid or flu vaccines.) I stayed in bed until after noon on Saturday, then continued laying around in other spots in the house until about dinner time (taking 4 total regular Ibuprofen), when the symptoms disappeared abruptly, as suddenly as they had come on.

On Sunday, with my current Body Electric (workouts) streaming subscription ending, I bought a new 1-year subscription for 30% off. I participated in the Dharma Sunday guided meditation (an hour) on Zoom led by Joel Levey, which he titled “Radiant Receptivity.”

I worked out four times (4 hours) this week and got more than 10,000 steps on five days, including two over 12,000; some of that includes the 43 minutes (3.2 miles) on the treadmill during three evenings.

Cat: Ordered Bumble “oral health” dry food on Tuesday to add to his daily food service. He sees the vet on Monday for his oral surgery follow-up.

• Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: I did clothes laundry on Monday and Thursday and vacuumed the kitchen and family room on Wednesday. Cleaned toilets, sinks, counters, litterboxes, etc., as usual. My husband made the dump/recycling trip on Tuesday. We walked to a local jeweler to see about having a necklace chain (from an Etsy gift) shortened — the jeweler was able to do it in about 15 minutes and charged us $10, probably quite a bit less than if we’d had to mail the whole thing back to the Etsy seller to have it shortened or exchanged.

Supplies: I ordered two eBay long-sleeved T-shirts and, separately :-), cat food to promote “oral health” on Tuesday; we’ll be mixing that in with Bumble’s other kibble and continuing to also give him some wet food every day.

Food: I made cacio e pepe with shrimp, spinach, and artichoke hearts on Monday which we also had on Tuesday, probably with some raw veggies. On Wednesday, my husband picked up Indian takeout while he was in Concord, which happily carried me through dinners the rest of the week; he needed to make his dinners on Sat. and Sunday, and on Sunday I also roasted root veggies (orange beets, carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic along with olive oil, parsley, and dill) for us. He made three sourdough baguettes on Monday and walked one over to some friends.

Financial/Admin: My husband returned a Christmas gift I received (a duplicate jigsaw puzzle) at no cost by dropping it off at an official UPS store while he was in Concord for other reasons on Wednesday. Yay! On Wed. I also backed up my computer. I bought a 6-month subscription at half-price for Ancestry on Wednesday after learning the public library isn’t offering it to patrons anymore (not enough interest and it’s apparently quite expensive for them to offer it).

• Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleep was all over the map, with a low of 6 hours 46 mins and a high of 9-1/2 hours, and the same with the FitBit sleep scores, with two nights scoring a 90 (excellent) but on other nights a 73, a 78, an 81 (fair to low-good). Overall, my hours-per-night averaged 7 hours 48 mins, and my sleep score averaged 83.4. I had a little more than 13-1/2 hours of REM sleep — and I wrote down several dreams on each of three mornings — and a little more than 8 hours of deep sleep. In my dreams I spent one night in Paris (actually at least two days in dreamtime), another in Italy, and another in a town with cobblestone alleys (that one was also multiple days).

• Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching  

New Word: coprophagy (from my Harris Center Nature Almanac & Calendar, thanks MAB) — let me know how you use it in general conversation!

Reading

BOOKS: I finished My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Ottessa Moshfegh and quite enjoyed it. The young, beautiful, thin, well-off (from her inheritance after her parents’ deaths) unnamed narrator of this novel embarks on an extended hibernation in her New York apartment in an attempt to escape her own unhappiness and alienation from the world as it is (the upper east side of Manhattan in the year 2000), hoping that she’ll be “reset” when she emerges. She’s aided in this adventure by a rather shambolic therapist who keeps her in sleep aids, anxiety medications, serious barbituates, sedatives, & hypnotics, and a curious (fictional) drug called Infermiterol, which makes our anti-hero black out for three days at a time, even while she’s is apparently actively, though sub/unconsciously, living her life and making mostly reckless decisions. You come to understand the need for a long and deep sleep as you learn about the people closest to her. The ending is stunning, even though foreshadowed. Now I’m reading Olga Tokarczuk’s novel The Empusium and have a Scarpetta novel on tap after that.

OTHER:

From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Reva is her best friend)

From The Empusium

I agree with Feynman that science adds to wonder and mystery:

Watching

We’re back to watching “Shetland” on BritBox again, season 7. I’m also mindlessly watching “Happy Howlidays,” a 2024 Hallmark Christmas movie, in small chunks while I treadmill.

Listening

• Connections &  Community

Local Support: This week I bought birdseed at the local hardware store, a few items at the local independent drugstore, several days’ worth of Indian takeout from the closest (or next-closest? might be a tie) Indian restaurant to us. And as mentioned, we went to our local jeweler for help with a necklace chain. I didn’t get to any co-op, any coffee shop/bakery, or to the local farmstands this week, which is unusual.

Relationships: Permaculture group met on Zoom on Thursday morning with 8 of us to begin discussion of Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which we all really liked (so far). Salon didn’t meet. My husband and I had a Zoom call with friends (R&ChN) in Baltimore on Wednesday night for 1.5 hours. I texted my cousin (AWB) on the anniversary of her mother’s death (my aunt who died 15 years ago). My husband walked some homemade bread over to friends (N&TD) on Monday. On Tues., I ordered a Valentines gift for my sister and her family. Had a couple of phone calls with my other sister, an hour on Monday and 25 minutes between two calls on Tuesday. I’ve got my usual winter hibernation going on to some degree.

• Endings 

Thank you, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Janet Yellen, and many others.

• All This Useless Beauty