Two Confessions

Want to hear the first one?

I love to garden. I love the smell of the dirt and the feel of it in my hands and planting the seeds and the plants growing all around me. I love seeing all the flowers and vegetables all blooming and ripe and ready. I love it.

Want to hear the other confession? I suck at it.

Oh, well. It makes me happy, and I keep trying, and so there you go. It is what it is. The worst thing of course is that cheesy metaphors are everywhere and it's almost required that I use this to make a Point about Something Important. Really, no. I'm not going there. I'm just thinking about this because I'm irritated that my pumpkin vines are only producing male flowers. The vine needs to produce both genders in order to get a pumpkin going, which probably says something about the nastiness of my so-called garden soil. Does fill dirt count as soil? Probably not. Thus, no punkins this year.

Figured out the snap pea thing though! That's a first for me, so there's something. That, and dwarf cukes. Not bad for a poseur who doesn't know what the hell she's doing.

The other reason I'm thinking about gardening today is that the Spouse is making noises about wanting to xeriscape the front yard. Now, we have a Colonial style house in a Colonial style neighborhood, white pickets fences and the whole 9 yards. Everyone else in the entire neighborhood has a grassy front yard of some disposition or another, because that's how it's done around here. This being a neighborhood with an HOA, we gotta do it how it's done or they gangs up on us and floods us a mailbox with Letters. So I'm casting around for ideas on how to make the Spouse's dream of never again using the $400 lawnmower come true, while also keeping the mailbox free of the dreaded Letters (I'm waiting for HOA's to discover the Howler -- then we're really bleeped). So, it's out and about on the IntarWeb to find formal Colonial garden ideas. I figure if we keep the requisite amount of grass on the yard -- there's always a Requisite Square Footage -- we should be able to get it down to weed-whacker-size so it's like, what...10 minutes of mowing? Swishy-swish and we're done.

Ironically (in the HOA's eyes, not ours), he wants to keep the backyard mostly grass so the kids have somewhere to play.

Should I talk about writing today? What's to talk about? The story has taken over my life, rules my every thought, and makes me really yell-y. And my shoulder hurts. I pulled something.

Ta-da! Updated.