Pottering about the house

Today was a day of frantic activity with periods of glassy-eyed stasis.

Poor Aoibheall is sick with an enervating crud she picked up from the BabyGoddess. She was supposed to go in to work today (mandatory overtime...we need to play catch-up...) but instead spent the day barely able to open both eyes at the same time, drinking juice and feeling pitiful.

I took the girls on massive grocery shopping and then spent the afternoon doing some gardening. Some things I have discovered, in no particular order:

• There's a gopher living in (or, at least, rooting around and tunneling through) our compost bin. Gross.


• The half-casks that Aoibheall picked up on the cheap to use as planters hold about 3 cubic feet of soil.


• Not only do we have gopher(s) and ducks and banana slugs and deer (and the occasional wild turkey), we've got some kind of hawk or falcon. I buried the remains of a pigeon (excuse me, a "rock dove") on which it breakfasted this morning. The raptor was light gray-white with dark spots all over, and seemed smaller than the red-tailed hawks I've seen in San Francisco. I wonder if it was a peregrine falcon.

The BG and I have planted a pair of strawberries. In three years I predict that we'll have more strawberries than we know what to do with. We also planted a rhubarb. Maybe this summer we can have pie! The persimmon tree that Aoibheall's coworker gave me is planted down by the creek. I hope the gopher stays away and eats the compost instead of its roots. BG and I also planted seeds for tomatoes, chiles, and eggplants.

Aoibheall had Peaches bring in a couple of empty cat litter buckets and put them in the bathrooms. We can now capture the cold water we run while waiting for it to be warm enough to bathe. The intent is to use that water for watering the plants. I'm now imagining some kind of cistern that we dump the water into and plumbing to take the water to the different plants. Not this year, maybe, but someday. I bet my lovely wife is sorry I ever saw Masada.