Good morning! Hello there. Happy Monday hope you had a lovely weekend. My weekend was pretty good! Got a lot of gardening done. Plants in the ground! Very exciting. Planted all my potatoes, some strawberries, raspberries, and a bunch of fruit trees that are almost certainly dead because I forgot about them all winter and just left them in a bucket of water for, like, oh, I don’t know, 120 days or so? Whoops. But I have a lot of dirt and pots, so I figured they deserved a shot, and if they don’t work, well, I still have dirt and pots, so what’s the risk. I got drip emitters attached to everything too. And I took Teflon tape to all the connections where the drip controller meets the spigot, and I just went out and peeked out there and nothing was leaking after being left on all night, so that is great! In twenty-two minutes, supposedly the automation is going to kick in, and all the plants will get automatically watered, which is just so great, can I tell you? I really hope it works. Drip irrigation is the best! Now I can just stress about the size of the whole system and hope and pray that once I get all the emitters and holes for all the plants, there is still enough pressure. Fingers crossed!
I also got my gardening journal organized and up and running, and I got all the photos of all of the seed packets and boxes sorted and categorized and uploaded to Evernote so I can be much more accurate this year about “X days until harvest” and not just leave things the ground forever and ever. I can’t believe I did that. That really is a step up, just an absurd level of garedening dedication. This pandemic has permanently changed me. It is alarming.
And here is this week’s gardening video, which features some very satisfying high-speed overhead footage of holes being drilled in buckets, and some good Jane appearances, but no Emma appearances this week sadly.
I got all the gardening done by Saturday afternoon (had Friday off, you’ll recall, since I was supposed to go to Boston but did not) and got the editing done Sunday morning. So by Sunday afternoon, I was all done with everything and was looking forward to relaxing for a little bit. But then Emma came to me, very distraught, and said she just saw that Roy wasn’t able to pee in the litter box, and that when male cats can’t pee it is a giant emergency and they could die very quicky (intelligent design harrumph harrumph) and she needed to go to a vet that was forty-five minutes away because every vet around here was completely booked solid and busy. From the sound of it, I am pretty sure if you were a vetrinarian around here you could probably make a solid living working one day a week if that day is Sunday.
So anyway, around 2:30 she packed up Roy and headed off to Burlington, leaving me to watch Jane the rest of the afternoon. Which went just fine and Jane even let me play a little bit of my game, that was nice of her. Then we made dinner, Jane and I, and I left the kitchen exactly as messy as I tsk tsk Emma for when she makes dinner with Jane. She is 100% right that you can make dinner and watch Jane at the same time, but you can’t make dinner, watch Jane and clean as you go. Some sort of child care-slash-culinary project management triangle going on.
Jane and I cleaned and then we went on our evening walk without Emma, which also went well, no problems. Actually everything all afternoon and evening went well except teeth, where Jane was… not super cooperative. But we got over that little hiccup, and by the time Emma was back home (having endured countless texts from Jane saying things like “I’m wondering where Mommy Went. Hi Mommy” and “I R T ty v C GM fun gym.” Jane can write perfectly fine but right now she thinks “nonsence” is hilarious) Jane was ready for Grammy’s all changed into jammies with her bag packed.
Also Jane pooped in the toilet twice yesterday on my watch. The current state of things is she’ll poop in the toilet for Emma but not for me. Before yesterday, only one poop in the toilet on my watch. So we doubled the count yesterday. Fantastic.
Anyway Roy is fine. Probably. Mostly. Sort of. He does not have the thing where is going to die because he can’t pee. In fact, when Emma got to the vet she took him out of the car and realized he had peed in the car (I’m sure this is going to smell fantastic forever). So that is good. They aren’t sure why he only peed in the car, definitely couldn’t pee in the litter box, etc., so he’s not out of the woods yet but on the flipside he has some awesome pain killers and he is still doing his cute thing where he comes up to you and flops and waits for you to pet him, so that is good.
I was very worried about Roy! I am relieved! Roy is the friendly one, Jane loves Roy, he comes into her room every morning and flops and we pet him it is an integral part of our morning routine and Jane is very sad when it doesn’t happen. And while I think Jane would comprehend death, I would like to postpone that conversation for, mmm, imagonna say two years? That would be perfect. Kind of weird waking up one day and thinking your big accomplishment for the day is going to be teflon taping up a faucet and then realizing nope, instead today you might have to explain death to a toddler. Real step up in the import of your tasks for the day.
Jane and I went to the new pharmacist this weekend. Without ever calling me or acknowledging my request, and taking four days to do it, my ENT doctor’s nurses who are clearly three nurses pretending to be my ENT doctor dressed in a trenchcoat, seem to have called in the prescription to the local pharmacy. Weirdly, the prescription still exists at CVS, and weirdly, CVS claims they refilled the prescription on 3/31, which they did not, so who knows. Those guys are on crack. Also they keep texting me twice a week asking if I want to put prescriptions on auto fill and I say no, and they they text me about it again and there does not seem to be anything I can do about it. Anyway, while I was at the pharmacy they also had my Wegovy ready. The pharmacist is like “it’s Ozempic not Wegovy” and I say “that’s fine it’s the same stuff it’s 1mg right?” And she says yes. And I say cool. And she rings it up and says “that’ll be fifty-three dollars.” And I say “that’s not right” and she gets this look in her eye like she does not want to deal with someone who is gonna nickel and dime her and I say “no no it should be like sixteen hundred dollars” and she looks mildly shocked and I say insurance hasn’t been approving it and she goes and confers with the head pharmacist in low tones that I cannot hear and she comes back and she says “he says it went through for insurance I’d take it if I were you” and I do and I am psyched. I guess my new doctor somehow got it approved even though my old doctor couldn’t. I know he tried because we talked about it. And it’s weird that now that I have lost thirty-five pounds they’re like “sure now you need the weight loss medicine,” but I am not complaining. Another theory I have is that maybe my old doctor, whom I loved because he DGAF about anything and let me do what I want, also DGAF about, like, insurance approvals? Just a theory. Anyway that is huge news. I’m very excited.
You will all be happy to know I busted open a new dozen eggs and after two dozen that did not include the Vital Times, this new dozen does indeed incude an edition of that respected periodical and indeed contains the new spring edition. Very exciting.
And you’ll also be happy to know that 8AM just rolled around and the automation seems to have worked just great and my plants are being automatically watered for the first time and it is very exciting.
And, finally, you’ll all be very excited to know that the cherry blossom tree is blooming. The most wonderful time of the year. I am so excited. It’s only about 80% bloomed yet, but it is getting there! Yay! I will have better photos of it never you fret but here is a sneak peek.
Got a drone rock playlist for you, only seven tracks because when people start droning they really get into it, you know? They feel it, so they have to keep on droning. Kinda weird, now that I think about it, that there aren’t more short drone songs out there, you know, on albums where people are like “well we gotta have a drone song the fans are expecting it but let’s keep it short” like the ballad on an 80’s metal album, though I suppose what band would that even be the case about. I remember reading in the 80’s some biography of the Jesus and Mary Chain and how everyone was so surprised about Darklands as the follow-up to Psychocandy because it didn’t have any feedback on it and how they could have, you know, phoned it in and gone corporate but kept a little feedback to keep the fans happy but they didn’t they just turned off all the feedback and I remember thinking how funny it was to imagine a 25 year-old William Reid doing that bit of triangulating. Man I think about that biography of the Jesus and Mary chain a lot, I am just now realizing, 33 years later. Weird.
Anyway, thanks for reading, love you guys, let’s all have a lovely week and talk soon!