Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)
- Weather
Another week of clouds and rain almost every day, another week of our weather station not working reliably. We think we have it fixed as of Thursday, though we’re not sure about the rain collection yet so our totals this week are all from friends who live a few houses away and have a rain gauge. The temperatures here are from our weather station except on Wednesday and Thursday, when our station was inside being checked; the numbers I’ve used for those days are from a household weather station a few blocks away, whose data is available publicly online.
THAT said: Temperatures this week were chilly for late May, with highs ranging from 58.6°F to 43.3°F, averaging 52.7°F; and lows ranging from 37.2°F to 43°F, averaging 41°F (so no frost and no freeze). Monday was brisk and windy, Tuesday was cloudy as was Wednesday, which was also chilly. And we had rain every day except Sunday, totalling, per my friends’ rain gauge, 3.45 inches this week. My husband will have to mow the lawn for the second time this year next week.
- Beginnings/Firsts
Our Christmas tree this year, the dwarf Juniper ‘Gnom,’ is now a tree of the wild, planted in a front garden by me on Tuesday after living in the cool sunroom for the last 4.5 months.
On Wed., we saw some spotted sandpipers at Kezar Lake, the first time that’s ever happened.
- Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post
Some of the birds heard by Merlin (and some heard or seen me) in the garden this week:
- Wandering
I walked in town on Monday, Friday, and Saturday and we walked at the lake on Wednesday. Rain and gardening made it difficult to get walks in this week. We wandered to Concord, NH, to pick up some veggie/flower starts on Saturday and run some errands while there.
in-town
birds heard around town
lake (besides spotted sandpipers)
birds heard at the lake
- Curiosity & Discoveries
I was amused by many of the foods offered for sale by Ocean State Job Lots in Concord, of which these are only a small representation.
These planters were for sale at a local grocery store.
- Creating
I didn’t create a new garden bed but I am revamping it and I sheet-mulched a border for (half of) it.
- Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)
Body/Mind: I worked out four times (4 hours) this week, strength-training and flexibility, balance, etc. I had a negative Covid RAT on Sunday. I walked more than 10,000 steps five days this week including two days over 15,000 steps.
Cat: We bought the cat a “new” cat carrier at Goodwill on Saturday for $8.40. It’s slightly smaller than his other one but fits him fine and it’s nicer. Not that he cares; it’s only for vet trips.
- Gardening/Yard
Lots of gardening this week. I was out in the garden for about 10 hours this week planting, sheet mulching, weeding, watering (new plants and container plants only), pruning, and pulling out Asian bittersweet, glossy buckthorn and Norway maple saplings, and Virginia creeper. My husband collected probably 10-15 piles of cuttings, pruned branches, and weeds this week to toss into the mostly unseen utility area in the back yard. He also spent a couple of hours cutting low branches and dead limbs from a blue spruce and a red oak.
On Tuesday I devoted about 6 hours to digging up most of the front island bed; cutting out the dead azalea using a hand saw; pruning many shrubs and trees, including a crabapple, another azalea, some rhododendrons, a privet (??), etc.; sheet mulching around the island bed for easier mowing and less lawn encroachment (2 hours); and yanking out invasives. I also planted a lot.
Planted in the front island, what I call “the wild garden”: the Juniperus communis ‘Gnom’ mentioned earlier, 5 bearberries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), 3 marginal wood ferns (Dryopteris marginalis), and a six-pack of coleus from the Grantham plant sale (which all seem to be dying and will be replaced next week with larger plants). I also accidentally dug up two of the three blue-stem goldenrod (Solidago caesia) I planted there a couple of years ago but after I belatedly ID’d them on PlantNet I replanted them. 🤞
Planted in other parts of the yard: two more white turtleheads (Chelone glabra ‘Black Ace’) from the conservation district, one swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and one Virginia mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum Local Ecotype) — to add to several others planted in recent years — from the Grantham plant sale, and six packs of nasturtiums (vegetable garden) and New Day Pink Shades gazanias, also from the plant sale, plus a kale mix from Foundwell Farm.
Still to be planted: a larger coleus and a larger begonia, both in the shade garden, a 6-pack of zinnia (front yard), a 6-pack of calendula (veg garden), and two larger scaevola (front yard, all from Grantham plant sale; a cardinal flower with dark leaves (Lobelia cardinalis ‘Black Truffle’, front island) and 19 gladiolus (10 ‘Donatella’, peach-coloured, and 9 ‘First Blood’, quite red) in two different sort-of sunny spots (all from conservation district); and 3 sweet basil, 2 sungold tomatoes and 2 gardener’s delight cherry tomatoes, 3 Northern bell peppers, and five larger nasturtiums (from Foundwell Farm). I’ll also have two Matt’s wild cherry tomatoes and one Napa Chardonnay yellow grape tomato from friends soon. And who knows what I’ll find at the farmstand next week?
of interest this week in the garden:
- Nesting
Cleaning/Maintenance: We did clothes laundry on Monday and Sunday. My husband fixed the casement window by my side of the bed again on Monday. I vacuumed the laundry area, hall, and dining room on Monday and the kitchen on Thursday. I cleaned everything in the guest bath except the shower on Thursday, too. I thoroughly cleaned the gas stovetop on Tuesday. My husband made the dump run on Saturday (he tried Thursday but it was closed for training). We got rid of a large paper cutter by donating it to a church yard sale this week.
Supplies: Trader Joe’s pine nuts from Amazon were delivered this week so I can keep making that asparagus-penne dish as long as the asparagus holds out. I ordered several bags of macadamias and dried pears from Nuts.com (but not the macadamias I most wanted, which are still not in stock). We bought two quite nice lampshades at Goodwill on Sat. for $3.40 each to replace two that were quite damaged.
Food: Monday night was canned soups (store-brand chicken noodle for my husband, leftover from his pre-colonoscopy treasure trove, and Progresso lentil for me) + grilled swiss cheese & arugula on homemade sourdough bread. Tuesday I made a batch of spicy black beans, edamame, bell peppers, corn, & scallions, which I had as a side dish to a mixture of egg noodles, scrambled eggs, and cheddar cheese (one of my comfort foods) and which my husband had along with more of his (large can of) soup from Monday. Wed., he continued on the soup theme (same large can) and the beans while I had a veggie burger with arugula and the bean mix. Guess what I made on Thursday? I cannot resist local asparagus, so it was penne, asparagus, edamame, pine nuts, our chives, etc. yet again that night for dinner and also on Friday. We got takeout pizza (spinach, artichoke, olive) and a salad to which I added lots more veggies and protein on Saturday from the local pizza place, which took us through Sunday as well.
My husband made a red velvet cake using cake mix and icing we found at Ocean State Job Lots on Saturday.
- Sleeping & Dreaming
My time sleeping per night this week ranged from 6 hours 21 mins to 8 hours 29 mins, averaging slightly more than 7.5 hours per night. My sleep score averaged about 86 this week. REM sleep accounted for 12 hours 20 mins and deep sleep for 8 hours 23 mins. I got only 26 minutes of deep one night, which I think is a record low for me. Aside from one other night of 52 mins, which is not that unusual, the other five nights I had over an hour of deep with four nights around 1.5 hours each.
- Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching
Reading
BOOKS: I finally finished Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922), which I complained about last week when I was in the middle of it. Now I’m almost finished with Long Island Compromise (2024) by Taffy Brodesser-Akner which is my kind of wealthy dysfunctional family book. Next up are Lies & Weddings (2024) by Kevin Kwan, Fever Beach (2025) by Carl Hiaasen, and Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark (2024) by Leigh Ann Henion.
OTHER
A handful of interesting articles crossed my path this week, including these:
✨Long article: AI in the garden: Will we build bridges or barriers? in the Radicle newsletter. Much more in-depth than I expected from the article’s title. They look at immediate risks and long-term existential threats of AI; the high environmental cost of AI; technological solutionism (using it to solve a problem we don’t really have or to solve a much bigger and more complex problem than it can); how AI is being trained; how AI can be made equitable and how it can be developed and used responsibly; the problem of “societal acceptance of digital abundance as a substitute for embodied life”; and so on. Concerning the natural world, they write “A piece of AI technology might be able to process (human prioritised) data and interpret it to give us useful information quickly, but I don’t believe it is a substitute for us paying proper attention.” The article should not be behind a paywall.
✨From Jessica Wildfire at The Sentinel Intelligence (probably behind a paywall), The Subtle Art of Chillapse: Finding calm at the end of the world. From which:
“Telling someone to stop thinking about collapse isn’t therapy. Neither is pressuring them to pretend to feel happy. It’s repression. Repression might make us all easier to deal with, but it doesn’t solve our problems. Over time, it makes things far worse. In fact, doomscrolling seems to resemble exposure therapy. Doomscrollers gradually develop a tolerance for collapse and make a place for it in their lives, so they stop reacting to with with so much fear. … At least in my experience, I’ve reached a point where I know when I’ve consumed enough. I have an adequate sense of how bad things are. Then I can sleep.”
✨In The Guardian, Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues, by Adrienne Matei:
““Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025. First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation. ‘What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has.’”
✨Finally, Maria Popova’s short article in The Marginalian, Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility. She quotes Nussbaum, talking to Bill Moyers in 1988:
“The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
Watching
Mostly “Vera” on BritBox (finished season 10, started season 11) and also an “I Love Lucy” (in Hollywood) and a “House Hunters.”
Listening
Shazam’d this week —
- Connections & Community
Local Support: Shopped at the farmstand on Thursday and the local co-op and the bakery/café on Friday. Bought plants from a small farmer on Sat. (including a few in addition to those I had ordered months ago). Bought large pizza and salad from local pizza place on Sat. My husband volunteered for 4 hours with the local car museum on Tuesday.
Relationships: No permaculture meeting or Salon this week. Tuesday while I was rehabbing the front island garden our neighbour (BSF) walked over to chat for about 20 minutes; we hadn’t really caught up since they returned from their winter in Florida. I was able to give her one of the shrub twigs I got from the conservation district that I couldn’t use. Tuesday was also my cousin BJG’s birthday; I texted her happy birthday when I got up and she texted when she received the flowers I had sent. On Wed., a friend (KKT) sent a catch-up email and I wrote one to another friend (RVN). Thursday a friend (RL) came over for about three hours for tea & snacks. I emailed a friend (JSK) on Friday who was having shoulder surgery that day only to find her insurance had denied it!; we emailed back and forth a bit after that. Saturday we picked up plants from a one-woman (AW) farm in Concord where I’ve been buying native plants and veggie/annual starts since 2014; it was fun to see her again and talk plants, and then I ran into another friend (MC) there and we chatted too. My husband helped a friend (SD) with a spigot problem on Sat. (though neither could get it to work). Sunday I ordered a restaurant gift card for my nephew for his birthday next week. I also texted another cousin (AMW) on Sun., whose birthday is next week, to find out what she’d like.
Donations: Besides donating the paper cutter to the church sale, we also dropped off some A/V equipment at Goodwill on Saturday.
- Endings
- All This Useless Beauty
From Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “At the Bay”:
Go look at that sapsucker again. Why is it so gorgeous?
something about this pine cone got me
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