Eggs

Back in the day, my mom would draw an X on a hard boiled egg so that we'd know which ones are raw and which ones are hard boiled. I have carried on the tradition in my own home until recently, when I've used them to share my disgruntlement and make mrguy laugh.

Here are a few from the lockdown and windup to the election. Which shells would you want to crack first?

Really, Birx? What do they have on you that you would stand in front of us every day and lie?

My Pillow guy gives me a cramp

In general, although there have been some bright spots.

Co-conspirators, apologists, rapists, and the guy my family believes because they think he's dreamy.

Susan Collins. The next time I hear someone on the Left getting excited about one of her whimperings I am going to punch something.

Same with Mitt. Stop crowning him with laurels when he does one thing you like. He's not your guy, and Louisville Grand Jury you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Haven't heard anything about Steven Miller in a while, and I do hope that he suffers for a long time. Dr. Conley, you are a tool of Satan. 

And other eggs to come, I'm sure, after Trump somehow manages to "win" the election. His desperation is frightening right now.

Buy Nothing -- Plants

I'm loving my local Buy Nothing Facebook group. I have given and I have received.

My favorite thing is the vegetables and plants that I've gotten. One lady was giving away a huge geranium. I cut it into sections, rooted it and am nursing it back to health in various locations.

One guy was giving away green tomatoes, which led to this happy dinner last week. Fried green tomatoes were a delicious treat that my dad used to make on occasion:

Earlier this summer a man posted that he had Chinese plums, a favorite food of my childhood. We had a tree in the back yard that pumped out the fruit, and my dad and I sometimes canned them together. The flavor of stewed plums is one of those Proustian things...

The other day I posted a request -- anyone have shiso? Any color? I've been trying to grow it from seed for months, with no success. A wonderful person gave me this entire plant. I'm so excited.

And another lady yesterday posted that she wanted to give away a celery plant. That's my next acquisition. I am thrilled to have my own celery. 

Can't wait!

Updates from the Aku Room

It's been about two months since I decided to do something with the aku room. I tidied up, I put together benches on Juneteenth, while listening to Ibrahim X. Kendi in conversation with Brene Brown re: anti-racism. And slowly I've been adding:

• A set of wall pockets we bought 30 years ago
• A thermometer (it reached 120 this past week. I kept watering, but wondered if I was really just boiling the roots of my plants)
• Two benches, in order to get my plants and seeds off the floor
• Some cute little vials for starting cuttings. I've successfully started calibrachoa cuttings and will repatriate them into their original planter on the porch. I've also created new starts of our amazing perennial basil that we've had for many years. I was worrying that this would be the last year of these plants and the cuttings are now doing better than the original. We finally ate some of the basil the other day. Similarly, thyme, grocery store basil, etc.
• Geranium plants from an estate sale that were not doing well on the front porch. I replanted in happy soil, fertilized, and now I have red flowers every day. Ahhhh.
• Cannas. Also faltering where they were hanging out. Replanted in happy soil, with lots of heat and sunshine and a good drink every day, they have tripled in size. Inspired by this, I'm bring different varieties inside.

The seed report is more spotty. Early on in the pandemic I watched a lot of weird videos that made growing things from seed look magical. Bury that thing you just ate in a wet paper towel! In time-lapse you will see it grow into something that you can cut up and eat again!

Things that failed (edible and non-edible):

• Shiso (cannot get it to start from seed -- ever)
• Echium Pretii (bought for mrguy and can't get it going)
• Cineraria (darn!)

Things that are going right now:

• Garlic (what the hell, right? stick it in some happy soil)
• Cara Cara oranges (from the last orange I got at grafting day)
• Bell pepper

The big hit are my tomato plants (from seed). I have some in a big planter with happy soil. Then I got two hanging thingies and put them in them with happy soil and they are happy but not putting out flowers yet. There is one in a pot on the upper lanai that has tiny fruitses, and the biggest one from the aku room is going like gangbusters. It has been such a bright spot in my day.

Before. Milk crates, failed beet sprouting, seed experiments, my lime pickle (mrguy hates but I think it is fabulous).

Clean aku room, with tomato starts in wall pockets, thermometer above them, and my new benches.

Today. Rug, gigantoid tomato plant, hanging tomato plants. The works.

My little vials that I use for starting plants from cuttings. Currently calibrachoa (which is also blooming) and grocery store basil.

Two garlic plants, pineapple sage (from a cutting) and red morning glory plants from seed, that aren't doing as well as the ones I didn't transplant.

A friend from Japan keeps a green onion going in a glass on the windowsill in her kitchen. I thought I'd do the same. The green growth is from two days in the glass, which is pretty cool.

Herbs that have moved from the glass vials to some self-watering planters. We ate some basil the other day.

Hollandaise

Made an insane recipe this morning, which I fed to mrguy. At one point I had a crisis of faith because my Hollandaise was too runny. I consulted a recipe and was just about to pull the trigger when the sauce firmed up.

I documented my success just in case the sauce broke.

Turned out fabulous.

Vacation food.

A Better Day

Yesterday was a better day. After last weekend's fighting with siblings about mom, and revealing the true depth of my sorrow and anger, there was an agreement to some sort of family mediation. I can get therapy for myself, but the source of much of my angst is the conflict between my sister and the rest of us siblings. So if that scenario is still the deal, it's pointless to seek help.

As always, my caveat is that my sister works harder at this than all of us. But I don't think that my mom had to be taken to the Midwest, come back, quarantine until her Covid test came back negative and then have my sister take care of her solo for a week or more in order for things to be where they are right now. I am grateful and not grateful, I guess. Mom's now off all of her psych medications and taking Benadryl to make her sleepy.

Yesterday I got to hang out with both the sister and mom for a few hours in a park. It was relatively pleasant. No barbs were thrown. I socially distanced, but mom didn't wear a mask, and we sat by a path where lots of people passed by. It was fine. I made a flower arrangement for mom and she seemed to like it.

Having done that, today feels like a better day. Boy Kitten is feisty, having waged a successful battle against Rainbow String.

I cleaned his room and washed all of his bedding in hot water and bleach, gave him flea bath, killed a bunch of fleas, and tomorrow he will get a flea treatment.

Our friend, the hardest working man in Hawaiian show business delivered both mussel and limu poke today, and we are having it large.

Mrguy bought lots of potting soil yesterday, and we fixed up the dozens of succulent pots on the upper deck. I gave fertilizer (worm castings) to our plants.

A little more kitten play-time, some Indian food and Hamilton! I admit that things go so fast that I caught the lyrics on my laptop, and we stopped about a third in, because it was so interesting. The desire to sleuth about all of these people who you read about in school was too strong.

The desire to sleuth means that this is a better day.

Random Haps

Mom is back in the state. Her visit with my sister didn't go as planned. I think they're getting COVID tests today to see whether they can get her safely back to her community. After that I don't know what happens. We're still sheltering in place over here, and my mom has been on two plane rides in two weeks, so I hope she and my sister are ok.

This week I hit the wall with a project that I've been supporting for many years. First I realized that I can't actually make the project better, then I realized I can't do it any more. That was actually depressing, because I might be made to continue. More later.

On the up side, mrguy is painting the lady bathroom for me.

I have started randomly poking plants into the barren hump of land in the middle of our street.

Boy Kitten is still in isolation for another couple of weeks, and he keeps growing like crazy.

Yesterday I made chicken and slickers, which was quite tasty.

And I have been working on the aku room. I bought two benches and organized the plants I've been growing in there. Today I might try to make an upside down tomato pot out of a cranberry juice jug.

We had a beautiful sunset the other day.

And last week I made a bunch of succulent cuttings and people from the "Buy Nothing" group on Facebook took them away. And yes, that's poison oak in the bush above!

When times are tough (family, police brutality, futility, pandemic), it sometimes helps to document the good stuff.

And Now We Wait

It's been a while. We've lived a few lifetimes in May. The many phone calls, the begging to be taken to see my brother, the violent episode where she broke stuff. That time when we thought her doctor fired us. And then middlesis arrived, intending to take mom back to her state.

We didn't want her to (am I repeating myself?) for fear of her safety, mom's safety, coronavirus, everything. And I have stayed out of it since she got here. I appreciate the break from the chaos of mom and the adrenaline poisoning of family strife, but I don't think we're closer to any resolution about what to do about her situation. We are not closer to finding a psychiatrist. If we do find a psychiatrist I don't know whether my family will take recommendations that might not agree with their world view.

I do not know what happens next. I'm avoiding my mom. She's back to loving me, she says.

In the meantime the world is falling down around us. Middlesis' home town is on fire, and the hotel where she was staying here was also close to local protests. I did not help with mom while sis was here, because I believe that my mom needs to be living in a more supportive environment (memory care), and what sis is doing is avoiding that same thing.

Yesterday we did what people do when times get tough. We took the kitten cure. There were 11 kittens in two litters that were offered on our work bulletin board. Yesterday the owners were only able to catch one, and he's the guy we brought home. He's really beautiful.Taught him to purr, gave him a flea bath, and now he's done all of the important functions. He has the run of the ugliest room in the house until his vet appointment in ten days. Currently known as Boy Kitten.

SIP Gardening Notes

As I mentioned earlier, my grafting experiment was a bust. But while watering today I discovered a few things that were not.

Several years ago I bought a gigantic Cecile Brunner rose at an estate sale. It has never really bloomed much, and I was about to give up on it but I decided to give it one last season. It appears to be doing well! We have gotten several blossoms off it already and they smell heavenly in the kitchen. 

Nearby there are wild strawberries that grow behind the garbage can. The plant grows like a ground cover, which is kinda nice (i.e. green) and I decided to encourage (i.e. water) it. Yesterday I saw something red underneath a leaf and it was a little strawberry. Today  looked for it and found it and its bretheren. I ate the first one and it tasted AMAZING. A cartoony strawberry flavor that reminds me of eating sugary breakfast cereal. I can still smell it on my hands hours later. I found another fresh one for mrguy and fed it to him.

So tiny. So good.

Orchids In Place

I feel like the least sheltered in place human around. In the last two weeks I have been:

• In the ER for 6 hours
• To the podiatrist
• To the eye doctor's office
• To the mama's doctor's office (to pick up a urine sample kit)
• To a hospital (to drop off the above)

I've also been to the pharmacy (because the Depends orders didn't arrive), to the market every day, to my mom's retirement community twice (picking up prescriptions), and to the mama's shelter in place location three times (to get her settled, and to bring groceries). Mrguy has been on most of these adventures also, and I worry about him.

It's funny how much effort we exert in order to keep a 92-year-old healthy and happy. And it's a little unfair that after five years of sprinting to do so we now are running uphill with this coronavirus thing. Mom will probably outlive us all.

It's important in these times to remember that beauty has a purpose and that gratitude is healing, so I made sure to stop and take photos at the doctor's office, even though I kinda hate him for making us do a urine culture on top of all the other stuff we're doing. But here you go:

I really like how this orchid seems to be yelling at me:

Coronavirus Sheltering

While we can shelter ourselves at home, that wasn't a possibility for the mama, and we have caregivers to think about and it brings a different level of complexity to this situation.

We moved her into the Airbnb, which is beautiful. But settling in required a lot of last-minute wrangling, while listening to mom's non-stop litany of questions and general yammering. We had to put everything away that we'd brought with us, as well as hiding beautiful items that the owners had set out. The mama likes to pick things up and examine them, and she breaks a lot of things, so we hid many objects in the closet.

In the meantime, she took out her hearing aids because she wanted to not hear my sister, who was devotedly transporting her from her house to the new place, an hour-plus ride. So when we were all together in the new place she complained that we were speaking too quietly. We weren't speaking to her, so whatever.

Have I mentioned that I'm kinda *over* my mom right now? Tired of the slings and barbs, and the recent relentless wheedling about how everything would be perfect if she could have her #1 caregiver all the time, not #1s daughter, #2. We have explained to her that #1 is an extraordinary person who could not be duplicated and who has her own life to live outside my mom's. So we have #2, temperamentally different from her mom, who is really nice and completely competent and works mostly nights. Mom is never satisfied.

The awesome thing about the mama is that she doesn't seem to feel bad about herself *at* *all*. Her impression of herself is that she is completely capable: "I could have helped you with that!" (translation: it's your fault that you're working so hard on my behalf because I could help you and you don't ask me to), "I could just drive over there if I wanted" "Don't you think you could have told me that?" (translation: I can't remember, but it's your fault). She does not really understand that the fact that she has had caregiving for the last 5 years means that moving to an airbnb means that she will have caregiving there, also. And we have to have conversations about this stuff and it's exhausting.

+++
Update: we're half a day into the process. We brought the mama to her new digs, moved in her clothing and some food. Upcoming tasks include figuring out the tv situation, setting up her shower bench, trading some meds with the nurse at her apartment building and getting a urine sample.
+++
Happy thought of the day: all this mom stuff keeps my mind off the coronavirus, even though we're doing it because of the coronavirus. Funny!