Trying to recover

[elfs]

Well, I have managed for four days in a row now to get enough sleep, and I'm happy about that. Yamaarashi-chan has come to live with us now, and we're getting into the groove of her night rituals. That is one heavily medicalized kid: prescription toothpaste, allergy medicine, and then there's the daily therapy for her lazy eye. I discovered this afternoon that she's been cheating, tilting her head in one direction so that her weak eye does very little work and her strong eye does all the moving to generate parallax. (Oooh, I've always wanted to use the word "parallax" in a sentence.)

I haven't written much in the past four days, not for lack of wanting. It's just that all of life has been crushing in on me, hectic, frustrating, stressful. Still, I'm getting miracles done. At work, I spent three weeks down in the bowels of Samba, trying to make it user-friendly with our product. I wrote thousands of lines of code. You know what got people's attentions? I made a one-line code change to the menuing system so that now instead of just popping into view, they fade in gradually over 0.2 seconds. It looks great, but it's just a setting.

Last night, Omaha and I went over to friends' house for Midsommer Rite, where we sat around and ate honeyed bread and had mead (or apple juice for the kids). Kouryou-chan and Yamaarashi-chan love the two little girls who live there, twins with bright blond hair, but that much childish conspiracy frightens me sometimes.

Tonight, I made angel-hair pasta with scallop-and-lemon marinara. It was a new recipe, with the scallops cooked first and then the pan scrapings, garlic, lemon juice, parsley, capers, one big can of whole tomatoes (gently smushed with a spoon), and white wine all cooked together into a sauce. I put the scallops back in to rewarm them, then cut up three scallops for the girls. With a drinkable but unassuming shiraz called "Little Penguin," (I'm a Linux geek; I got suckered by the penguin logo, but it wasn't a waste, it's a good wine for the price) it was delicious. The girls made it all disappear.

The past three weeks, Omaha and I have been on the go-go-go. Barely time for each other, we haven't had time for the garden, so it's a no-go this year. Sad. And I really haven't had time to do the proper maintenence on it anyway. I discovered this evening when I went out that the one hardy plant I rely on, the parsley, was being choked to death by morning glory ivys. Friday evening and Saturday morning, I think it's time to get out the shears and commit some major botanicide. (Is that a word?)

Comments

[mothball-07.livejournal.com]

choked to death by morning glory ivys.
Truly morning glory? Or *shudder* bindweed? If the latter, I'd consider covering the area with black plastic and letting it bake for a while, if you're not planting anyhow.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

"Roundup", or "glyphosate" for the generic name, is one of the safest herbicides around. Soil bacteria will eat it. It's even usable in watercourses, though you really have to know what you're doing, and regulatory authorities have been getting rather more sensitive to politics in recent years.

In the UK, you can get it in little hand-sprayers, pre-mixed, for domestic garden use. You need all sorts of qualifications to use any pesticideas part of your job. Some awkward plants need a much higher dose, and maybe wetting agents added -- spraying extra pre-mix doesn't have the same effect.

It's not always quick-acting, and if plants are under drought-stress they can survive the chemical -- glyphosate subverts the plant's own biochemistry so that the plant produces poison, and if it's not actively growing the glyphosate doesn't work.

As I said, one of the safest pesticides around. But be sensible. Protect your eyes, don't get it on your skin, that sort of thing.

[tonyawinter.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on having your daughter Yamaarashi-chan come to live with you! This bodes well for her life and yours. :)

[slfisher.livejournal.com]

We get bindwind here too. It's a bitch and can take over things *very* quickly but it pulls up pretty easily and it's very gratifying. *riiiiiiiiiiiiiip*

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

If you must poison the yard (my term for it) with something like RoundUp, instead of spraying, take a paintbrush and paint it on the leaves of what you want to kill. This technique is particularly useful if there's something that you want to save and encourage being choked out by something you want to kill. If you paint it on the leaves, you will kill what you paint it on, while preserving what you didn't paint it on. I used to do this in California to kill the blackberry bushes that were choking my rosebushes to death. It worked really well; I saved all the rosebushes and killed the blackberry bushes.

Now I am completely an organic gardener and don't use it at all, but this technique does work, and work well. Just be careful of how you paint, since RoundUp is a broad-spectrum broadleaf weed killer, and if you splatter too much, you'll also take out the parsley.