Eat My Yard

I started them 2 months early and their tendrils have begun to wrap around the sun. Each day they get more out of control and left to their own devices would surely travel all about the room clinging to picture frames and dangling from light fixtures. If ever I become an eccentric millionaire I will install discrete grow lights throughout Chez Hovel and encourage such indoor/outdoor confusion but for now I will be repotting them into gallon pots with stakes just like at the nursery. According to my trusty kill a watt my current setup costs 66 cents a day but to outfit the whole house would likely be upwards of $66 and also attract the fuzz.

In other news, I had a bit of a scare with a spider today at work. It was crawling along the backup power supply cord and most likely was intent on getting into my rucksack or hiding in my pantleg but froze when it saw me sizing him up. It’s creepy the way they can see you. I’ve been having a sugar ant problem at my desk so I talked myself into the idea that maybe he would eat 2 or 300 if I didn’t squash him. Later I started worrying about all the millions of spider eggs an ant infestation of that size can support.

It’s only March 6 and already the plastic bag tree is fruiting.

Recently this website, which all along has only been cobbled together with sticks and magic, disappeared into the ether. And oh it is irritating. There has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of stylesheets and threats, and fist shakings because I do not like learning new computer related things. I’m trying to remain flagrantly ignorant of how anything at all works but apparently some MySQL error came along and fucked my shit up and now I have to start over with some lame ass skin and nothing looks right and everything takes a billion hours to fix. I am seriously considering an alternative form of blogging where instead of tap tap tapping away on a laptop, I shout profanities from my porch.

I just spent an annoying amount of time trying to make a picture I took of a mushroom growing in my bag of seed starting mix look other than a piece of chamois leather sitting in dirt…TO NO AVAIL. So here is a clipart lettuce head because the real lettuce is small and the lights are bright and the photography gods require a sacrifice of some sort.

But the lettuce is up!

I’m going to plant an impenetrable hedge all around my house which will look something like this. My reasons are many. First of all I like hidey-holes, nooks, crannies, and concealment. Secondly, people keep stealing my shit. Seriously, since I’ve lived in this house these are the things (that I know of) that have gone missing:

• the back license plate
• a 65lb rusty cast iron bell
• a bunch of homemade CDs
• a dump trailer full of garbage
• a work van full of tools (recovered sans tools)
• a few chickens
• a pumpkin
• an extension ladder
• one cat

None of this would have happened if I had been able to stow my bell, extension ladder, garbage, CDs, pumpkin, and work van within the confines of an impenetrable hedge. I suppose an argument can be made that raccoons do not find hedges to be impenetrable, but I have no proof that the tool thieves did not also steal my chickens. Also every August a gang of stealth gleaners steal my plums, sometimes breaking branches in the process, so the plum tree will especially benefit from the impenetrable hedge.

A third reason for camouflaging my house with brush is that because of some poor landscaping choices made by the neighbor recently, I now have a fine view of some crappy apartments that I was pretending were much further away. Also, the 7-11 parking lot light is like a fucking second moon. I’m going to see if I can get my impenetrable hedge to curl up over my house so that it’s enclosed in a dim sort of cocoon. It will be like living inside a wood rat’s nest.

I’ve been researching privacy hedges and for the most part they seem boring, ugly, and expensive so I’m taking mine in a different direction. It’s going to be made out of sharp plants like barberry, wild rosebushes, and holly, and seeded with stinging nettle and poison oak. Hopefully some yellow jackets will nest on the outskirts.

But here is the scariest Halloween picture ever. I have asked him repeatedly to stop making that face as it is rather terrifying even without the makeup.

In other news what the Hell happened to Day Light Savings time? Was it something like a month late this year? I deduced that it wasn’t coming at all and was enjoying my dark as a dungeon mornings and reasonable 6:00 pm dusk. Yesterday I ran home in the pitch black and worried about twisting a limb. I may have to attach some sort of blinking light to myself even though that would fly in the face of my commitment to haute couture (as evidenced by the fact that I haven’t worn Carhartts to work even once). Today I did wear a cardigan that was missing some buttons but since I didn’t button it up, it didn’t count.

Even though it’s already November, which is a goddamn travesty, I’m going to plant garlic this weekend. I also have to put the Marvelous Plot of Less Than Awesomeness to bed for the winter lest the church folk take it away from me. I’ve already pulled the blackened anemic tomato vines but I have a niggling feeling that I left them in a big pile along with various sunflower detritus. It’s kind of backwards to have to haul shit like that away only to bring it back next year in the form of compost but those are the rules. I can’t decide whether or not to plant a cover crop. I know I should because this year’s yield was so pitiful but it would be so much easier to just throw some black plastic over the whole thing and be done with it. What I would really like to do is scorch the earth because clearly some of the seeds I planted in the spring are the kind that only germinate after a fire, but I suspect that it’s too wet now.