The Ink-Pot and the Palette

*taps mic*

*peers out past the lights into the auditorium*

Is this thing on?

*clears throat*

I have missed personal blogging! My online life has dwindled to Twitter (@darkemeralds), where I get all my news, including fandom news. I think I'd like to expand back onto the internet again. Maybe.

( Dipping a toe back in )

Okay, not exactly a mic drop. Just life. What's new with you?

Today my new door is due to arrive, and this evening I get my new mattress.

Door and mattress. I remember a day when I wouldn't have considered either of these things as exciting as I do today, but here's the thing. There's been a sheet of plywood screwed to the back door frame for weeks, and if I want to use my refurbished back yard--which I do--I have to go out the front door and around the house (through amazingly recurrent spiderwebs) carrying my computer, my iced beverage and my phone. Decency demands, incidentally, that I be dressed before I do this.

So by Saturday I hope to be able to rise from the supportive and yet yielding splendor of my memory-foam-enhanced bower, drop the coffee beans on the floor if I want to and be able to reach down and pick them up, and then, coffee drink in hand and possibly still wearing my bathrobe, exit privately to the umbrella'ed table next to the gently plashing rehabbed home-made water feature in my charming outdoor living space, and there be the Queen of All I Survey.

And not a moment too soon, either, because even more importantly, my lovely guests kis and Mr Kis will be able to enjoy the same during their visit, which is less than four weeks away! Eeeee!

I got an estimate this morning on Project Mudroom: The Continuation. And it was an estimate I could actually live with.

( Project Empty Phase II.i Mudroom Continued, Section B Paragraph 6 (c) The Back Yard )

A fleeting moment of Pacific Northwest summer this year was surrounded on the mid-June and mid-August sides by cool, cloudy, rainy days, and now it seems that fall is here. It was 57 degrees in my bedroom when I woke up this morning. Already time to start closing the windows.

From four seeds that a friend of my mother's brought from New Zealand a couple of months ago, a single heirloom nasturtium has managed to bloom at last.

( I took a picture of it last night. )

(Cross-posted at La Vida Locavore.)

Back in April I planted some potatoes.

They duly came up and filled the container with a riot of green, leafy plants, which I fed a diet of dishwater and what sunshine may come when the Pacific Northwest is having One of Those Summers.

Today, a couple of the plant-tops were yellowing and pretty well finished, so I dug down and lo! Spuds.

( Just like at the grocery store, only smaller. And fresher. )

I call it a win. A tiny, tasty triumph.

Just about a month ago, I overcame a significant prejudice* and dipped my toe into the uncharted waters of urban farming.

Well, the Yukon gold potatoes that I chopped into chunks and buried in a container on April 13 have sprouted and, as of Wednesday, sent six or seven tiny glossy green leaves up into the sunshine.

Potatoes. That was gonna be it. Fun, easy, everyone loves to eat 'em, not a big commitment.

Right.

Monday I dug up a weedy portion of my neglected garden and bought lima bean, acorn squash and zucchini seeds. Today I planted two dozen or so sweet Spanish onions. Tomorrow? Extend my drip irrigation system--which I've neglected for two years--to the vegetable patch.

Next year? I shudder to think.

*Prejudice in the form of: "Why would I come home from a day in the office doing one job to take up the job of farmer in the evenings of the hottest and most unpleasant time of year, when I can go to the grocery store and buy what few vegetables I bother eating?"

I've been working hard over the past year or so on making meaningful inner changes. A critical job problem and some other trials and losses led to a few rounds with serious depression, at the nadir of which my inner voice delivered an ultimatum: "Do something about it or die."

( Some stuff I've done. )

No, "there isn't any there there". I still live in the same tiny house. I still drive the same car. I'm still single, I'm still over 50, and I struggle with almost all the same issues as before. Recovering from depression, damn it, isn't a magic cure for other things.

But I'll say this for it: every hour that I live in the light rather than in the darkness is an hour of real life, an hour in which I can create or do or be something that I had no strength for in the past. I may never accomplish another meritorious thing in this life, but I got across the river.

"That's not much."

"It's enough."

It doesn't feel like Christmas. My family and I have agreed to limit gift-giving, so I've had almost no exposure to holiday retail--though I did brave Trader Joe's this morning for some cookie ingredients. In my new job, a disparate team of employees and consultants banded together just a few weeks ago for a one-year project, and nobody has had the time or the familiarity for an office party.

There's no space in my living room for a Christmas tree. I have lights up around my porch already, all year long. And the weather is just gray and rainy. And besides, I've been arm-wrestling with demons for possession of my soul fighting depression for a while, and the whole Christmas thing has seemed a bit...extraneous.

But lo! (I can say "lo" because it's Christmas Eve) there are signs of victory. I went to the nearly-deserted Portland Nursery yesterday with my sis and bought trees!

I haven't had the slightest interest in my garden for well over a year, and if you'd asked me in the last few months, I'd've said, "Screw it. Tear it out and put in lawn and barkdust," so this urge to buy trees seemed like a return to the land of the living-on-earth.

And what's more, today I planted them. I got out there between rain showers in my grubby clothes and bandanna and the ugliest shoes ever to attract spiders in a shed over long periods of disuse, and I played in the mud.

I planted a persimmon and an apricot. Tall sticks, the both of them, but with little bud nodules all up and down their twigs, and the promise of round orange fruits some summer--this coming one, or the one after.

Afterwards, with compost and bark dust layered around, and the mud sprayed off my shovel, and the buckets put away and the plant tags saved (Prunus armeniaca, Diospyros kaki), I came in and threw my muddy clothes into the washer. I love that part. I showered, had a cup of tea, and then set about baking cookies.

To all my LJ friends, the joy of the season and a wish for peace and tranquility in the new year.