1. According to Downstairs Neighbor S, Upstairs Neighbor T got a new job and therefore he, Upstairs Neighbor E, and Mini-Upstairs Neighbor C will be moving away in August. I will miss them. (I am also unsure what's going to happen to the raspberries, as they were Upstairs Neighbor E's pet project. I mean, I'm willing to keep an eye on them -- maybe even acquire some long sticks and a bit of twine to give them stuff to climb on -- but I don't have a lot of use for raspberries myself. Allergies suck, you know? I suppose Downstairs Neighbor S might make them into preserves if enough survive the depredations of our local birds and squirrels.)

2. I made a run out to Target today in search of A) a potato masher, B) a grater, C) a set of plastic hangers, and D) a new shower liner. I acquired all but the fourth, because they had a frosted fabric liner and a clear plastic liner, but no frosted plastic liners. Ugh. So I ordered one online from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

3. I also walked into the Bon-Ton again while I was at the mall, and lost a good hour and a half clothes-shopping. (Everything was on sale for at least 60% off! And they're pretty good quality clothes, too!) I came away with two new pairs of pants, one super-comfy work-appropriate sweater for this fall and winter, and one work-appropriate t-shirt.

4. When I dumped my kitchen compost into the communal bin this evening, there were so many maggots squirming around the rim of the plastic liner. SO MANY. I mean, they're harmless and a natural part of the decomposition cycle, but still. Gross. Also they grow up to be flies. But I left them alone, because see above in re: part of the natural decomposition cycle. (I am so dragging the bin to the curb for pickup next Tuesday, though. Blech.)

5. I cannot believe it took me an entire year to realize this was an option, but a couple days ago I took my two rescued spider plants out of the plastic bin they'd been sitting in, and put each of them into their own separate plastic saucer. (Which are just repurposed takeout container lids, but whatever, they're saucers if I say they are.) Now they finally have room to properly stretch their leaves without getting in each other's way! :)

6. I've finished two of the three child psych quizzes for this two-week unit, because upon occasion I can be efficient. *wry* I plan to do the third tomorrow, after I read the relevant chapter during slow periods at work. Also, I am very proud of myself for correctly figuring out how Prof. S meant one of the questions to read instead of getting caught up in the technicalities of what he'd actually written. (He screwed up his example so it didn't actually mirror the example from the textbook, but I figured he wanted the answer that did mirror the textbook, and lo and behold I was right.)

7. I hadn't seen Wilson (the house cat, who technically belongs to Diagonal Neighbors Z and T) since before I left for Minnesota, but I ran into her in the stairwell Monday evening on my way home from work, and she was happy to see me. So I sat on the stairs and petted her for ten or fifteen minutes, and she jumped quite eagerly into my lap, which was gratifying. :)

8. I voted in my House primary last night, but we're all still uncertain who's going to challenge Reed in November. The current front-runner is Max Della Pia, but he's only leading Tracy Mitrano by 26 votes and there's potentially up to 1,000 absentee ballots still to count, so... I guess we'll find out in a week or two.

Random things about Wilson (my diagonal neighbors' cat):

1. It turns out Wilson is actually female? Whoops.

2. I left my apartment door open for a bit on Halloween while I was getting myself situated in the stairwell (chair, tissues, Kindle, etc.) to deal with trick-or-treaters, and Wilson slipped into my apartment and made herself at home under my bed.

Have I mentioned that I am allergic to cats?

Anyway, I couldn't fish her out, because trick-or-treaters, but after twenty minutes or so Diagonal Neighbor T came home and I got her to retrieve her cat.

3. According to Diagonal Neighbor Z, Wilson doesn't give a lot of signals for "okay we are done with petting now" before jumping straight to biting your fingers. This actually matches my observations fairly well, which is why I asked him in the first place, hoping he had secret insight.

4. If I sit down on the front porch, back porch, or front yard while Wilson is around and feeling sociable, she will come sit in my lap. This is very warm/friendly, and also probably good for my mental health.

(I am kind of... uh... touch-starved, I think is the term? As in, I don't get a lot of physical human contact. Or really, I don't get any except when I see family or a couple of my oldest friends, and occasional glancing things like handshakes. I would like to change that, but I am legit terrible at turning casual acquaintances into friends. Pets seem like a much more reliable method of getting a regular source of friendly touch.)

A random assortment of stuff done recently(ish):

1. Raked three bags of leaves in the back yard, and texted Landlord Dude to see if he wanted them to use as mulch/winter insulation for his garden. He does, and will come pick them up sometime this weekend.

(I left the front yard and all the verge alone, for Halloween ambiance reasons. *grin* But our back yard gets rather attenuated sunlight as it is, so I wanted to give the grass a few last weeks to fortify itself for the winter.)

2. Finished my federal tax preparer continuing education requirements. I also got onto a company notification mailing list I'd apparently been left off of, which is good because it contains things like, oh, the mandatory skills training session dates. *headdesk* Fortunately, I will be able to get to that event without much trouble. I'll also start working on my New York CE requirements tomorrow.

3. Harvested two more peppers this evening and made a batch of veggie sidedish.

4. Pinned a pair of pants for hemming. (Ah, the joys of being short...)

5. Vacuumed my apartment.

6. Collected Halloween funds from my housemates (I live in a four-apartment house) and bought a ridiculous amount of Halloween candy. See, I live in the trick-or-treating neighborhood for Ithaca, and we get utterly mobbed every year. I have never yet ended the night with candy left over, though I buy more each year in an effort to satisfy the hordes. Possibly this year will finally be the one I have stocked up enough! (Also I need to collect another $5 from each apartment, since I overran my estimated budget. *sigh*)

7. Tentatively agreed to work an extra shift at the rental office next week, while Mom Boss and Aunt Boss are in Syracuse for a meeting.

8. Plinked tentatively at a few creative endeavors. I have A) given names and jobs to the characters in the urban fantasy/superhero story I'm writing for Susan, B) added a couple hundred words to two longstanding WIPs (one I have never talked about; the other is an Enchanted Forest Chronicles fic I think I've posted excerpts from in the past), C) acquired the canon for my Yuletide fic, and D) prodded an outline for another WIP until it coughed up a few more details.

9. Weeded through my AO3 subscriptions a bit, reducing the "works" section from 25 pages to 23. Some fics I bookmarked (in Chrome for my own reference; I don't bookmark stuff in the Archive itself very often), others I just deleted entirely.

My number one wish for the Archive remains increased functionality for the subscriptions pages, btw. I want to be able to sort stories by fandom! Failing that, I would like the fandoms of each work to even be listed, along with the titles and authors. If freaking ff.net can manage that, I think AO3 certainly ought to be able to reproduce that general effect!

1. Texted Upstairs Neighbor E about leaving her family's seltzer cans in a box outside my door so I don't have to fish through the gross communal recycling bins to collect them. (Her family is not interested in returning them for the bottle deposits. I am.) She said yes, so I have put out a box.

2. Finished one transcript request for my application to TC3. Another one is in progress -- I just need to print, sign, and either fax or mail a document, which I intend to do on Tuesday (taking shameless advantage of the rental company's printer, and possibly also their fax machine). The third transcript request must be done via telephone, so that's a project for Monday.

3. Boiled four eggs.

4. Poked around the Not the IRS continuing education/re-certification website and signed up for an online course. No live in-person events seem to be scheduled for my area yet, but I will keep checking back periodically. (Hopefully district management will also send out an email about that by the end of July.)

5. Washed laundry. Dried laundry. Folded laundry. Put away laundry. Hung other laundry up to air-dry overnight. Laundry is serious business!

6. Changed linens.

7. Made a weekly to-do list and taped it to the wall over my computer, which is another new scheduling hack I am trying in addition to my daily to-do lists.

...

I am considering going to bed very early tonight. I am also considering making a bag of microwave popcorn (courtesy of a former tenant who has yet to cancel their mail-order snack service a month and a half after moving out) and watching Moana on Netflix. I am not yet sure which option will win.

So my narcissus bulb from last year, which began sprouting with such promise in November, turned out to be kind of a bust. Not only did it fail to bloom, it also couldn't properly support its own leaves and is just very sad. :(


.
1) old narcissus, Monday, 21 November 2016
2) old narcissus, Monday, 19 December 2016


However!

I went to this year's solstice ceremony on Tuesday the 20th, and the narcissus bulbs seem to have become a tradition because I got a new one. In fact, I got six; there were a bunch left over and the organizers started encouraging people to grab extras as the service broke up into general socializing. :)

I left my new bulbs in a shallow, water-filled dish over the weekend while I was away, and they responded by enthusiastically sprouting roots. So when I arrived home this afternoon, I went to Agway and bought two bags of potting soil (I didn't actually need both now, but I will need a bunch of dirt in March or April for my next batch of peppers and I figured I might as well stock up now) and duly potted them.


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3) new bulbs after a weekend in water, Monday, 26 December 2016
4) new bulbs potted, Monday, 26 December 2016


My ultimate plan is to move the bulbs out to the back yard -- probably between my porch/deck and the scraggly raspberry canes that Upstairs Neighbor E planted last summer (they lived! barely, though, and they produced, I think, one berry between the three of them. drought, you know?) -- after they finish blooming this winter. And then perhaps I will have OUTDOOR narcissuses (narcissi? narcissus? argh, whatever) in April 2018. :D


[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

1. Pepper photos and posts.

2. Thanksgiving, etc.

3. Bought groceries.

4. Acquired bus tickets for my two December trips down to NJ. (The first is for Mr. M's memorial dinner. The second is for Christmas.)

5. Boiled some eggs.

( more items under the cut )

11. Threw out my peppers that were done for the year and had been freezing out on my back porch. I knock the dirt into the little garden patch at the foot of my porch/deck, and lay the plants themselves in a small pile at the back of Downstairs Neighbor S's carport; they compost pretty well by mid-spring.

12. Cleaned the now-empty pots and stakes, and put them away for the winter.

13. Changed linens (pillowcase and towels only).

1. Talked with Upstairs Neighbor E about supplementary dogsitting and gave her my new spare key. I will drive down to NJ on Sunday and drive back Monday with Dottie, who will be with me until Wednesday the 28th when my parents will pick her up and head home while I'm at work. But my job at the rental office involves very long days and Dottie needs a mid-afternoon pee break, so I've enlisted Upstairs Neighbor E to drop by between noon and 3pm on Tuesdays and Saturdays to take Dottie outside for a bit.

On Wednesday the 21st, I will just have to take a 45-minute lunch break instead of a 30-minute break and get the person who has admin access to the timekeeping program to adjust my punch times for that day -- which shouldn't be a problem, but I didn't want to say, "Hey, you only just hired me and now I need to inconvenience you by taking extra-long lunch breaks for my next four days," because that is a good way to wear out any welcome grace period really fast.

( more items under the cut )

And now on to today's list. :)

twelve peppers, Monday, 4 July 2016



the smallest pepper, probably dying



that funny leaf patch, now more obviously not-quite-right



another leaf with issues


Last week I mentioned that one pepper was clearly smaller and growing more slowly than its fellows. Well, it just got worse and worse through the week, and then -- adding insult to injury -- got uprooted by a squirrel early Monday morning.

(Let me tell you about these squirrels. So there's an evil mulberry tree bang up against the post of my back porch, right? Which means a good half of its branches are growing right toward the house. I clip the ones I can reach, but I'm short and so is my stepladder, and I only have hand-clippers rather than a proper extendable tree-hook thingy, so my area of control is limited. There are several branches that grow right up against my upstairs neighbors' windows.

And two days ago, some enterprising squirrels investigated one of those windows, discovered its screen had a hole, wriggled through, and were gleefully tearing up the kitchen when my neighbors got home. Upstairs Neighbor E complained to Landlord Dude -- as she damn well should! -- but who knows when he'll get around to doing anything. I wish to god he'd just admit he can't handle all the necessary repairs himself and hire contractors, but apparently pigs will fly before that day comes. *headdesk*)

But back to the peppers. When I righted the poor seedling and packed dirt back around it, I noticed its stem had a funny weak/brown section perhaps a quarter centimeter long, suggesting that it's doing poorly because the roots and leaves are barely able to send energy and/or nutrients to each other. I have no idea how to fix that, or if it even IS fixable, so I'm just going to water that pepper along with the others and expect it to die. :(

There continue to be some minor leaf irregularities. I have not sprayed insecticide, so I think this may be a reaction to the (obviously completely ineffective) anti-squirrel spray. Yet another reason Bonide Repels-All sucks!

[[original Tumblr post, for when the embedded images inevitably break]]

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ETA: madamehardy informs me: The symptoms you describe – a browning stem, withering leaves, and stunted growth – sound exactly like fusarium wilt, a.k.a. "damping off". It's a fungus that hits anything in the nightshade family (potato, tomato, eggplant, pepper) and is viciously destructive of basil. I've given up trying to start basil from seeds. You can, of course, use fungicide.

For tomatoes, your best bet is to look for varieties that are labeled as fusarium resistant. Tomatoes will generally be labeled something like VFN or VFNT in the variety name: that means they're resistant to the fungi verticillium, fusarium, nematodes, tobacco mosaic virus: it's a long list. Alas, there's nothing similar for peppers because no resistant varieties have been discovered

Tl;dr: Damping off sucks. It's not really under your control; you just throw away the plant (NOT in the compost) and move on.

Today I cut down two trees.

Context: when I moved into my current apartment, back in... I think 2009? Anyway, there were a couple shrubs attempting to grow along the side of the driveway, right up against the wall and foundation of the house. I probably should have just uprooted them at that point, but I don't tend to think about yardwork until things reach a crisis point, so six years later they had gotten very overgrown. The bigger one was two stories tall and beginning to encroach upon Upstairs Neighbor E and T's windows.

I'd started trimming them back a little in the spring and fall, to keep the driveway from getting clogged up and also to prevent the smaller, whippy branches from making demonic screeching noises against my windows in high winds. It was a bit of a futile effort, since my stepladder isn't tall enough to let me reach all the branches in question, but it did reduce a chorus to a solo, which was better than nothing. However! Today while I was doing yet another round of pruning, Diagonal Neighbor P walked past, noticed I was using a tiny pair of handclippers, and asked if I wanted to borrow her handsaw.

I am not normally very good at answering when opportunity knocks, but this time I was ready. :D

And so the two 'trees' are no more, the yard waste compost heap in the back yard is twice as big, and I will never have to suffer those demonic screeches again.

A good afternoon's work, I think. *dusts hands*

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ETA: Other things done today include:

1. Took Dottie on an ADVENTURE! In other words, we walked up the Cascadilla gorge trail, then came back down via Collegetown and the gorge rim sidewalk. The gorge trail had been closed for a couple years while the Cornell Plantations did extensive repairs and improvements, but it's open again now and a lot safer and better designed. (Among other things, there are small drainage channels in many stretches of the walk, they moved the entire Stewart Avenue staircase about six feet south so it's not under a persistent drip from the gorge walls anymore, and the final ascent up to the Schwartz Performing Arts Center is completely re-engineered. Also there's some nifty signage.)

2. Bought groceries and filled my parents' car with gas since I had a 20-cent-per-gallon discount. (My grocery store's loyalty card offers 'gas points' in addition to general discounts. Normally this is useless to me, but since I currently have custody of a car, hey. I will take advantage. *grin*)

3. Changed my sheets and towels, and put my laundry into a bag and cart in preparation for actually washing it tomorrow.

4. Watered my houseplants; mixed their periodic dose of fertilizer into that water.

5. Sorted and folded the clothes I want to sell or donate to charity.

6. Snipped four baby spider plants and put them in water-filled glasses to grow roots.

7. Played fetch with Dottie for about half an hour. She does not quite grasp the concept of 'bring the toy back to the human,' but I've convinced her that she should at least bring the toy back to the same room I'm in, because I do not have the energy to play keep-away for extended periods of time.

Things I have done so far today:

1. Get haircut
2. Breakfast
3. Call Susan and chat/catch up
4. Start batch of bean soup in crockpot
5. Fix most recent holes squirrels have dug in my pepper pots
6. Take, send, and download daily picture of Cascadilla Creek

Things still on my to-do list:

1. Buy groceries (get deposits for returned cans and bottles in process) [done!]
2. Write at least 200 words of fiction
3. Change sheets and towels [done!]
4. Laundry maybe??? [noooooo; this is a tomorrow task]
5. Pay internet bill [done!]
6. Talk to Upstairs Neighbors E and T about payment for their use of my driveway
7. Lunch [done!]
8. Dinner [done!]
9. Take bean soup out of crockpot around 2am [done!]
10. Get started on tax homework

...

I don't think I'm going to get through all of that, but hey, at least I made a good start! And there is always Sunday for whatever I miss today. :-)