updates: garden, toe, art, irony

I went to bed one night in the first week of May and woke up the next morning in August. It's hot and dry with intermittent high dry wind, temps in the low 90s and getting hotter. I spent Saturday and Sunday moving the sprinkler around about every 45 minutes or so.

Saturday was the Garden Club's annual plant sale. They buy some things but most of what's on offer comes from members' own gardens. I haven't belonged to the garden club since 2020 and the onset of covid since at first they did not pause their meetings and made no concessions like mandatory masks at the meetings or spreading the tables out and after the first meeting or two of that year people at the meetings started coming down with the virus. Then I started volunteering at SHARE in 2021, on Saturdays initially but then Thursday mornings when they decided to reopen. Since the garden club meetings are also on Thursday morning that sort of put an end to my membership since my reception at SHARE was exactly the opposite of my experience at the garden club. I didn't go to that many meetings anyway as for the most part I wasn't interested in the speaker or topic (and some would just drone on and on) or because it was too early in the morning and it was a very cliquish group, hard to break in. I was never invited to come join any group at any table when I arrived. Some of them would greet me but that's about all.

Anyway, back to the plant sale which I did donate four or five things to this year. As members we weren't allowed to buy anything until after the sale ended and then we could choose from whatever was left over. My sister Pam is still a member and she called me to get my butt down there as there were a few things she wanted. As I walked out I told Marc the last thing I needed was more plants. So of course I came home with more plants though the prices were very high this year. I got some bearded iris bulbs, surprise lily bulbs (what Mary Moon calls hurricane lilies), a coleus, a chocolate plant, and the couple of things my sister wanted.

So here's what's going on in my gardens. Top to bottom: purple coneflowers, the first Easter lily, yellow daylilies, yarrow, and what I call miniature gladiolas. 

And it looks like my double orange daylilies that did not give me a single bloom last year as a result of the arctic blast that froze the entire state will give me flowers this year as I'm starting to see bloom scapes come up.

Big toe update 19 days after the removal of my toenail: A gigantic blister formed on the inside and bottom of my toe and that was where most of the fluid was seeping from. That's stopped now but the bottom of my toe is still sensitive where the new skin is forming under the old, now dead skin which hasn't peeled off yet. On the top there's some new pink skin where the old has peeled away but basically just the scab on the nail bed and some hard dead skin on the end of my toe.

And I finally sat down to seriously work on the drawing for the coral box. I have a drawing I like, 3 types of coral, 3 colors, and I'm thinking I will do a small sculpture of coral for the top instead of the dead coral I initially considered which will now go in the box. I don't know if I will try to sculpt it or use actual coral skeletons. Probably that. I do have some around here.

I'm not going to update you on this whole abortion banning mess this time but next post I'll have a list of the laws already passed waiting in the wings and the ones being considered as well that go far beyond just limiting or banning abortion is any particular state. I will say this though, peaceful protests have sprung up outside the homes of several of the SC justices and so the Senate yesterday 100% voted to allow government security for the families of the justices. Where was their concern when abortion clinics were being firebombed, when women were accosted and blocked and screamed at that they were baby killers when trying to enter PP or other women's health clinics, when doctors were being threatened and murdered and protesters were outside their homes screaming obscenities, when candidates withdrew from races because of threats from right wingers to themselves and their families, when Christine Blasey Ford had to move from her home because of death threats?

And from the There Is No Bottom To Irony department, Clarence Thomas feels like he's being bullied.