Momilies

I haven’t posted in almost a month.  Mia culpa.  I have no good excuse.  Yes, I’m busy because it’s summer and I like to be outside plus I have a lot of extra activities because it’s summer.  Pretty soon I’m out of time or just out of energy, and I don’t post.

I did promise you a blog that didn’t include information about the garden, or my leg, but the truth is, both of those things are part of why I’ve not been around.  My plot in the garden is growing madly.  The weeds are just about licked completely, so most of my time is spent watering , and nipping back the danged pumpkin vines, which are threatening to take over the entire thing.  I have three pumpkins on the vine, and as soon as I have about ten, I’m going to nip it and hope that it can keep itself contained.  We have been picking (and eating) squash, turnips, beets, and cabbage.  Tomato plants are loaded, the beans and peas should start blooming soon, one of the two broccoli are doing fantastic, the corn is getting ready to tassle, and the kohlrabi appears to be very angry with me.

My leg?  Good days and bad days.  I continue to bike three days a week, 30+ miles total.  Most days the ankle doesn’t bother me.  But it still freezes up, swells up, and aches, and I wonder if I will ever wear anything but tennis shoes and flipflops ever again.  Buggers.

Work has been…interesting.  We are getting a new department director (if they ever get through the hiring process) and in the meantime the current management is working through an aggressive and ambitious reorganization that includes getting everyone up to 40 hours a week as well as moving me out from under my current supervisor and more on an equal footing with the other specialists in the office.  This means I will lose my Fridays off, but will gain a good $800 a month in income.  This would bring me back up to the income level I had when I was working in Missouri, so this is a Very Good Thing.  This change will be difficult for my boss, and I will have to be sensitive to her feelings as we move forward.  But realistically, this is a good thing for the entire department.  My boss can spend her energy on projects that are appropriate for her, and I can be free to run the lab and manage student workers the way it needs to be done. It’s a win-win.

Speaking of work, I attended a consortium meeting in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, at the end of June.  Steamboat is about 190 miles west and north of where I live.  I loaded my bike on my car and headed uphill.  Steamboat is about 7800 feet, a nearly 3000 foot climb from the plains where I live.  My car did great, getting 41 miles to the gallon on the trip.  Once in Steamboat, I got my bike unloaded and road the paved trail by the river.  Steamboat is a pretty town, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  Other than touristy shops, there are two overpriced grocery stores and a Walmart.  And we already know how much I despise Walmart.  The nearest large shopping, including a Target, is two hours and 90 miles away, all on winding two-lane state highways.

The drive was beautiful, however.  I crossed the Continental Divide when going through the Eisenhower Tunnel, before getting of I-70 and heading north on state highways.  Despite the broad swaths of beetle-kill pine forests, there was much green there.  The landscape is mostly grazing land, topped with mountains and dotted with cattle ranches.  Large outcroppings of rock dotted the landscape.  This is not a place where cultivation occurs, but Cattle seemed to be doing really well.  Steamboat itself sits in a valley under the shadow of a ski mountain.  Both summer and winter tourism is big there; skiing and other winter sports in the dark months, and hiking and mountain biking in the hot months.  I’m glad I got to make the trip, even though it went by really fast and I wished I’d had the time and money to spend an extra day or two there.  Maybe I’ll get to go again.

Ski mountain towering over Steamboat Springs.

View from my cheap hotel in Steamboat – $80 a night!

View of the valley.

Where I rode my bike – there was a nice paved path alongside the river.

Lastly, my mother is visiting.  She came on June 24th and will probably be with us until the end of July.  We have taken a short trip to Santa Fe (that’s for another blog post) and we’ve hit all the thrift stores, and went to a few of my town’s events.  We will go to the mountains this weekend.  Mom-time is good, but it’s also tiring.  Being busy on top of that makes me extra-tired.  But as I like to say – winter is for sleeping.  Summer is for doing!

I know, another gardening post.  I promise, I’ll get back to posts about something besides my garden and my broken leg.  But here’s one more garden blog post before that.

We have hit a warm spell. so things are starting to grow like crazy.  Most trees have completely leafed out, finally, although there are some that are still looking like March.  None of the fruit trees have bloomed, however, due to the long and cold spring.  This is unfortunate.  This means I won’t have apples this year.  The lettuce seed I planted two months ago has finally grown enough that it may be edible in another week or two, depending on how much moisture I give that garden.  If I’m careful and cover them once it gets too hot, we could have lettuce all the way into August.

My big plot at the community garden is coming along nicely.  The sixteen cabbages continue to do well, even the two I thought I had lost.  After the big straw-turning-to-hay debacle, I think I have most of the grass under control.  I scooped off all of the mulch and laid down a double layer of newspaper, then moved the mulch back on top.  After a week, there is no grass growing through.  Grass is growing freely everywhere else, as well as other weeds, but not where I put the newspapers.  I will be employing the newspaper method elsewhere in the garden shortly.

Apparently, there was dill in the garden before I got it.  The tilling just spread the seed around, and I have some very nice dill seedlings coming up.  I transplanted two to where I wanted them (in between the squash and pumpkins) and am giving away the rest of the seedlings in a week or two when they get big enough to transplant. I love fresh dill, but I’m going to try to keep it from reseeding willy-nilly later in the summer.  Although, if I have to pull up weedy dills, they sure do smell good while I’m doing it!

Yes, those are rocks in there, with the mulch and the dirt and the weeds and the dill seedlings.  It’s a messy garden space.  It will be better as I work with it.

The squash and pumpkins weren’t all that happy to be put into the garden, but they will recover.  They look puny, and most of the blooms dropped off, but that’s okay.  They weren’t really big enough to be blooming like that.  They’ll still produce, I’m not worried.

Only about a tenth of the turnip and beet seeds came up, and there is no sign of the parsnips yet.  I will reseed more turnip and beets, and keep watering the parsnips, and wait.  I also planted corn seed yesterday, and both of the big tomato plants I bought on sale last week.  One is an Early Girl, the other a Sweet 100 Cherry.  I want to add at least two more tomato plants.  I had thought about doing heirlooms, as one of my plot neighbors has seedlings, but his are too small yet, and if I’m putting them in this late, they may not ever bloom.  So I may just buy a couple of tomato plants at the garden center and see how they do.  I also want to do some eggplant.  I can also put in pea and  bean seeds this week.  I will buy fencing this coming weekend to support them, and the tomatoes and pumpkins.  After that, I may be done planting.  It may be all I can put in.

I am helping to work on an additional plot with my neighbor.  One of the regulars in the garden doesn’t have time to work on his plot, so she and I are going to put a lot of squash and pumpkins in it.  I am seeding the squash now in my window.  It is winter squash, so if it goes in a bit late it will be okay.  We also dug a few “unknown” squash plants that were sprouting from one of the compost bins.  We’ll see what they are!  It will be a surprise!

I’m trying to leverage the cost of all the work, plus the cost of the garden and plants, against what we get in yield.  I do want to grow things that will help alleviate our grocery bill.  We don’t eat all that many tomatoes, so I don’t want to grow 15 tomato plants and watch them go to waste.  We will eat cabbage, and we will eat a few eggplant.  I love root veggies so we will eat a lot of those, and I love squash.  I’ll be trying to keep an eye on the cost to value ratio as I go along this summer.  Yes, I enjoy working in the garden, and sitting in the evening as the sun goes down while I water my plot in small pieces (we are not allowed to use overhead watering there) is my “zen” time, I still need to know this is doing more than taking up my time.  I already have plenty of things in my life that do that!

I am quickly approaching the five-month mark in my healing.  As you last saw, the healing is slow going, and sometimes painful.  I try not to spend a lot of time thinking about it, but just keep going about my daily duties.  I still have to think before I take a long walk, and a busy or active day will leave me feeling sore and limpy the next day.  Biking is no problem whatsoever, as it is pretty much non-weight-bearing, and unless I’m not careful when I step off the bike, I should have no problems.  I have been riding 10-11 miles each time, three days a week.  I would ride more but I just don’t have time.

Two days ago as I was working in the yard trying to clean up winter’s mess and get my gardens in shape for summer, I stepped on the edge of a piece of treated lumber that is buried along our walkway as a sort of “edging,” which forced my foot to turn outward, the same way it did when I dislocated my ankle.  I gasped and stopped, but stood still.  The one thing I fear the most, turning that ankle hard again, bringing on a repeat of the pain, did not happen.  In fact, my ankle felt incredibly sturdy and there was no pain at all, not even any stiffness.  I stepped off the foot and wiggled it and stepped down on it flat, and it felt fine.

Big sigh of relief.

However, I know there is a bit of PTSD messing with my brain these days.  I will be sitting somewhere, or laying in bed, and think about going downstairs, and have a pretty vivid vision of falling down those stairs.  I fall down the stairs a whole lot more than I’d like, but my fear is irrational.  Everything in my body clenches, and I get light-headed, and I’ve not done a thing but THINK about falling.  I hope this eases over time.  It’s probably my worst symptom.

I have pretty full range of motion, with no sign of a limp except when I am walking too fast or with a longer gait.  My regular bike rides have helped my stamina considerably, which means my overall strength is improving.  I still have a lot of numbness on above the instep, and that will probably be there for years.  It may never go away.  If too much pressure is placed on that area, by a shoe that is too tight or if I bang it on something, the resulting sensation is over the top.  So I’m still treating it carefully.  I still cannot sit with my feet stretched out on the couch or bed, that ankle just aches like someone is twisting it.  So I hang the foot off the edge of the bed, and that seems to help.  I don’t know if that will ever go away either.

There’s no doubt that I still have healing to go, and there’s no doubt that I will always have some impairment in that leg regardless of how hard I work to rehab it.  It still looks like there’s a donut around my ankle, and the foot swells sometimes, and there are shoes I can’t wear yet.  Sandals?  Nothing but flipflops at this point, and those are kind of dangerous so I try not to wear them anywhere but around the house.  Me and my tennis shoes are getting quite the workout.

I am thankful to be walking, to be able to do most of what I want to do.  I’ve got to keep that in mind, no matter what!

After five heavy snows in five weeks, this is about how I’m feeling.  I put my cabbages in the ground the week before Easter, and they’ve been limping along weakly since then.  Every week they get buried in another six, seven, or eight inches of snow.  This past Wednesday, there was eight inches of heavy snow atop them.  My beat and turnip seeds are not even bothering to come up, and they were planted on Easter.  The squash and pumpkin I started in big peat pots in my living room window are so big they really do need to be in the ground.  But it is way too early.  I should have started them two or three weeks later than I did.

The weather has been more normal in between the snows – temps in the 50’s and 60’s during the day, down to near or just below freezing at night.  Things that should be showing green are doing so, encouraged by the dearth of moisture.  The grass is green, my privet hedges are budding out, the lilac is too, and the apple trees are starting to show little green leaves.  The lettuce seed I planted in the little garden off my patio has finally decided to germinate, along with all the bird seed that ended up in that garden over the winter.  I planted pansies in the planter by the front door, and I added more dianthus to the garden behind the house to replace the ones that didn’t survive winter.  Pretty much, things are normal here, except for these weekly snow storms.  “Normal” April would be full of showers, even here.

It only goes to show, you just never know what kind of weather you will get in Colorado.  And we are still in a drought situation, for the third year, so even if our moisture is coming in the form of snow instead of rain, we’re pretty much not complaining. We need so much more to get back to “normal, especially in the southeastern part of Colorado.  Everyone is hoping for a wet year, although most long-range forecasts predict another dry year.

A week or so ago, I noticed something strange going on in my garden plot down at the community garden.  When you rent your plot, they give you a bale of straw for mulching your garden.  I had used about half of my bale of straw on the row of cabbages I’d planted.  When snow was predicted, I would push the straw over the cabbages, and uncover them when the sun came back out the next day or day after.  The other half of the bale sat in the walkway.  My entire garden plot is currently weed-free after being tilled nicely by one of my plot neighbors.  But this was not true for the row of cabbages.  Poking up through the straw was sturdy, bright green grass.  When I investigated, I found seed heads, and worse, a tuber with a dense root ball, at the bottom of these blades of grass.  Even worse than that, some of them had already insinuated themselves more than 2 inches into the moist soil around the cabbages.

The only place the grass was, is where the straw was, including the straw that had spilled over onto the walking path between the plots.

This was not straw, it was hay.  Hay with seed.  I sent an email to the coordinators of the garden about the problem, and was told this “has happened before.”  That’s just great, but now I had a major problem on my hands.  Even if I pulled the straw off, there’s all that grass to dig up, and then what do I do with it all?  Putting it in the compost pile is a bad plan, as it would just continue to grow there.

I spent two hours this morning bent over my plot, first raking off the “straw” as much as I could, then using a hand-fork to dig out as much of the grass as I could.  And I know I didn’t get it all, and will be fighting this monster all summer long.  The only way to truly get it out of there would have been to dig up everything and sift it, killing the cabbages in the process.  I did the best I could, what my back would allow, and recovered the ground around the cabbages with the bark mulch that the garden provides.  It wasn’t my choice to do so – bark mulch is great for pathways and for flower gardens, but not so good for vegetable gardens.  It doesn’t break down quickly enough and doesn’t add any real value to the ground.  I will likely be raking most of it out of there this fall.

I filled up two of the city’s “compost only” bins, and it will be taken away, rather than to sit in our garden’s compost bin.  I am pretty aggravated by the whole thing.  That two hours could have been put to better use, and was not work I was expecting to have to do.  And knowing that I will fight this problem the rest of the summer doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

I can guarantee next year I won’t be using straw that the garden provides.  If this has happened in the past, it will happen again, and I don’t want to fight this battle next year or the year after that.  I will buy my own straw from a reputable source, or use a different mulching product.  In the meantime, I’ll hope for the best.  I may spend next weekend raking off the bark chip mulch and laying down a layer of newspaper, then putting the bark back in place.  That may help later.  I hope.

The good news is that the ground under the straw was quite moist, and the cabbages are starting to actually grow, despite all the mashings under the snow they’ve gotten.  I have lost one hybrid for sure, and another hybrid has been pretty badly eaten by some pest.  The savoy look the heartiest at this point, with the stone head looking passable.  The purples still look gangly, but healthy.  That means I still have fourteen cabbages to look forward to.  I also planted parsnip seed today, two ten-foot rows of it.  Apparently, root veggies do well here.

This week’s forecast calls for rain every day in the late afternoon.  I hope it does.  The less watering I have to do, the better.

I just spent two and a half days in Silicon Valley. I flew in on a plane and landed in San Jose, stayed at a hotel in Sunnyvale, and had two days of training in Cupertino. In my drives around town, I passed by Apple headquarters, eBay, Seagate, Pixelworks, and many other giants of the tech industry.

I probably should have been impressed. But the fact is, I wasn’t. What impressed me was my drive into the Santa Cruz mountains, up winding, two-narrow-for-two-cars-to-pass roads that had such a thick canopy of trees that sunlight didn’t show through. About an hour west of the industry of hub of Silicon Valley is California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park.  At the bottom of the road, the trees were big.  Bigger than most old-growth trees I’m used to seeing in the midwest.  But as I and my little rental Kia traveled higher, the trees got bigger.  Much much bigger.  Near the top, some of the trees pushed up against the road were as wide as we were.  At the top, the trees were big enough to be houses.

I have never seen anything like this.  These trees are so huge that they put you in your place in the universe.  A very very small place.  These trees live to between 1,000 and 2,000 years old, and grow to heights of 400 or more feet.  They grow in little groups or pods, with five or ten in a circle, sometimes with a space in between like some sort of tree coven, sometimes with their lower trunks touching.  Most of the larger, older trees show evidence of lightning strikes and fires that probably burned or smoldered for months before the rain put them out.  These lightning strikes and fires do not kill the trees, at least, not quickly.  They live for hundreds of years after such damage, which rarely goes deeper than the bark, which is nearly five inches thick.

With all the destruction of forests over the years, with logging de-nuding much of the west over the last two hundred years, you might wonder how the Redwoods survived.  The fact is, Redwood isn’t good for a whole lot.  It is relatively weak, and can’t be used for lumber.  It isn’t pulpy enough to use for paper.  When cut into smaller pieces, it becomes quite crumbly and weak, basically disintegrating.  With no commercial application of the wood, these trees were left to continue to grow.

This was just about the most quiet place I’ve ever been.  Unlike other pine forests, the wind in the tops of the trees made no sound.  The wide canopy of the trees hushed out anything I might have heard, like airplanes.  And within the forest, with the younger Redwoods and other deciduous trees filling in, muffled any sound that might have gone through at ground level.  Even birds were limited, just a few finches and a blue jay were all I saw.

I’m glad I got to have this experience.  As I get older, I realize that all the things I can squeeze into my life are going to be worth it.  I had about six daylight hours to goof around before I would be stuck in training for two days, and I took full advantage of it.  Who knows when I’ll ever get to see such a thing again?  As I like to say often, never waste a nice day!

Santa Cruz Mountain Vista.

I was so tempted to walk this trail just to see where it went, but my ankle said no.

The hollow of this tree would have made a spacious bedroom.

That’s a darned big tree.  That is a building next to it on the right.

Redwood cluster.

Canopy.

Rings on a tree that had been cut down.

Burls at the base of a Redwood.

Burnt out Redwood.

The view from inside the burned out Redwood, looking upward.  Amazing.

 Mother Redwood.

Father Redwood.

This plaque contains the information for the big slice of tree in the picture following.  The little plates on the slice referred to events in history next to the ring that would have grown that year.

I work in the field of disability services, particularly working with disabled students in a college setting.

In that sentence, in some people’s eyes, I made one big error.  I listed “disability” before the person (“student”) and therefore, I’m placing the label before the person, when the person should come first.  According to some of my colleagues, I should be saying “a student with a disability.”  With this same logic, I should never say “the tall student” or “the black student” or any other number of signifiers we use as humans to label the world around us.  Humans label because it helps them figure out how to deal with people and situations.  Labels, in and of themselves, are not negative or positive.  They just are.  They are descriptions.

As in, “she’s fat,” or “she’s got brown hair.”

There are movements afoot all over the country, both by disabled persons and by the people who serve them, to eliminate the word “disabled” from our lists of labels.  Just as in previous times we removed the word “cripple,” “handicapped,” “lame,” “retarded,” “imbecile,” and “deaf-mute” from our lists of labels.  Those old labels became pejorative, negative, associated with the wrong ideas somehow, and needed to be eliminated.  We’ve eliminated other words used as labels over the years; words that labeled skin color or country of origin or sexual orientation.  Labels somehow become “non-politically-correct” at some point, so a new word has to be invented.

But words are just words.  Words mean what we want them to mean.  Coming up with new words to replace old words, with the hope that the new word will somehow be held positively, with rainbows and butterflies and tolerance and understanding, is disingenuous at best.  Changing the word does not change the purpose of the label, nor does it change the bigoted or misinformed or ignorant or arrogant assumptions of the person using the label.  In other words, it doesn’t matter what word is used.  What matters is how we change our perception of the word, and how we take ownership of the word.  It is about how we educate and inform and take on a word and its meaning as a label, and make it our own.

The LGBTQ population has done this with several of the word labels for them.  Instead of reacting negatively to the word “queer,” they’ve taken it on as their own, as a label that suits them just fine, and they don’t see it or perceive it as negative or pejorative.  Some people still use the word pejoratively, but since the person being labeled by the word doesn’t accept it as negative, it can no longer harm them.  That word is just a descriptor, a way to identify and label someone so that we know how to deal with the person or the situation we encounter.  The LGBTQ population has not pushed away the label that had become pejorative; they instead embraced the word.  They reclaimed it.  They actually never lost it.  Their reclaimed pride in the word as a label has changed its negative value into a positive value.

And I posit that reclaiming the word “disabled” can be the same.  There is no reason to allow the word to turn into a pejorative, a negative, a word that doesn’t fit the label it is intended to fit.  To say that the word is “bad” now is simply matter of semantics, unless the legion of disabled persons in this world want to turn it into something negative.  Why wouldn’t they instead want to reclaim the word; to make it mean what they want it to mean.  Take back that label, use it positively and refuse to believe or allow it to be used negatively.  A new word does not need to be invented or assigned.  The word that exists is just fine the way it is.  Own it.  Embrace it.  Do not fear it.

I did the same with the word “fat.”  Yes, plenty of people have, and can, try to use that word against me.  They can use it as a negative, as a pejorative.  They can use it to try to wound me, to cut me, to make me feel bad about myself.  But the truth is, it’s just a word.  It’s just a label.  It’s a descriptor.  It is nothing more and nothing less.  If the word no longer offends me because I choose not to be offended by it, then the pejorative loses its power.  It no longer has the right or ability to hurt me.

Changing the name of the label does not change the label.  Not allowing that word-label to have the power over us that others would like?  That is the only way to control how the label is used, and how it affects you. We don’t need new words to identify old labels.  We need to stop allowing words to make us feel bad.  We alone have control over how a word will be received by ourselves.  We, ourselves, have the power.  The word is just a word.  Nothing more.

We have had a few beautiful days here, and of course that makes everyone itchy to get out and put their gardens in.  Back in Missouri, I would have gone to town, I’m sure, even though it’s still a bit early, even by their standards.  Here in Colorado?  One must always remember that April is not safe, and nothing should go in the ground that you aren’t okay with losing.  For me, that has been cabbage plants, and beet and turnip seeds.

The beautiful days this past week are going to lead into a big winter storm on Tuesday that may dump considerable snow on us and drop us back into the low 20’s.  My cabbages will probably be fine; they’ve already survived at least half a dozen freezing nights already.  I will go that morning and cover them with straw, and let them back out on Thursday when the sun comes back out.  Snow, especially spring snow, can be quite insulating, not to mention very very moisture-laden.

I planted sixteen cabbages, four each of savoy, stonehead, a hybrid, and purple.  I did two four-foot rows of beet seeds and the same in turnips.  I won’t see seedlings for another week, maybe more.  And being cold-weather veggies, they should do fine as well.  The lettuce seed I planted in the garden behind my house has started to germinate, but it will be weeks yet before I’ll actually get lettuce.  The snow won’t hurt them either.

Still, it’s spring, and these warm days make me want to get out and plant.  My squash and pumpkin seedlings have all germinated, and are growing really fast.  They can’t go in the ground until at least mid-May, another month from now.  By then they will be climbing the windows.  I may up-pot them at some point, depending on their root growth.  They look great, though, which makes me happy.

In my flower gardens…the climatis I planted late last fall has started to bud out and looks very healthy.  Both of my peonies are sending up shoots, three times as many as the branches they had last year.  All but about a half-dozen of my dianthus have started to green up.  Considering how dry it was last year, this is remarkable.  The “annual” dianthus has been, for me, a great performer.  They over-winter, even in our wickedly cold temperatures, and seem to be pest-resistant. The four “Snow on the Mountain” I planted last fall are all back, twice as big as they were when I planted them.  They will have to fight it out with the poppies in the same bed, but they will do fine.  The poppies bloom and then turn brown and look awful; the Snow on the Mountain will come in and take up room in that bed so it won’t look so bare.  I still need to put in the ornamental grass that I had planned for last fall.  I will have to convince someone to dig the hole for me.  Digging with a shovel using my foot is still not on my approved list of activities.  Not that I like digging much anyway!

And now, pictures!

The garden plot after it was tilled, and after Tater and I raked in some organic matter.

My cabbages all in a row!

Closeup of one of the Savoy cabbages.  These will have bumpy leaves and be sweeter than regular cabbage.

Butterstick squash on the bottom, pumpkin on the top.

Almost fourteen weeks ago, I fell in the snow in Rocky Mountain National Park and broke my leg in three places.  I spent seven weeks in a cast, then four weeks in a cam boot.  I’ve been out of the cam boot for almost three weeks.  I have a long way to go before I’m completely healed, but I’m walking and climbing stairs and riding my bike.

I think the most frustrating thing, for me, is the lack of complete healing.  I’m an impatient patient, most of the time.  I don’t like being sick, I don’t like being laid up.  I don’t like not being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it.  So, nearly 14 weeks after my gruesome break, I’m still not really able to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

There are, of course, good days and bad days.  Today started out as a good day, and I was walking with almost no limp.  But by afternoon, I guess it was obvious I was in some pain.  One of my coworkers passing me in the hallway asked “is your leg bothering you?”

Yes, I guess it was.  I was limping like Frankenstein.  I popped some more ibuprofen and an hour later I felt better.  The limp is a result of stiffness and inflammation, and also some sharp pains I get in various places where the breaks occurred.  There are times I can turn the ankle and it feels fine, and others when that little twist becomes the thing that makes me hurt the rest of the day.  I know, I need to be patient.  I need to continue to do my exercises and get on my bike and try to walk as much as I can.  A month from now, I’ll be better.  A month after that, even better.

My goal was to be on a bike by the first of April.  I beat that by two weeks, and I’ve been on my bike five or six times since March 14th.  I started out with small rides (under 5 miles) but this past weekend I did the long ride, the whole 15 miles.  I even did ten hard miles in a strong wind.  Biking, oddly enough, does not hurt.  It is not weight-bearing, which is probably the biggest advantage the biking has.  And the biking will get my knees back in shape.

If there was a pill for patience, I’d take it.  But there isn’t.  So I just need to keep listening to my body and taking it easy as needed, and pushing when I can.  And I’ll keep telling myself I will be good as new.  Someday.

My ankles side by side.  This is first thing in the morning, when the damaged ankle is the least swollen.

Anterior views…

Interior ankle…

Yesterday was the first event of the season at the Community Garden.  It was to be an Easter Egg hunt and brunch potluck.  Most of the people who came seemed to know each other already, but I am new, so it will be awhile for me to feel like I fit in.

It was a beautiful day, though, temps in the low 60’s, bright skies with puffy clouds.  There was, thankfully, no breeze either.  Someone had set the tables with spring flowers, and the prettiest little hand-embroidered place mats, with state names and flowers on them.  I took a picture of the one from Colorado.

I made a fruit pizza to bring to the event.  This is an easy go-to when I’m not sure what people’s allergens are.  It’s a crescent roll crust, sweetened cream cheese, and sliced fresh fruit layered on.  Pretty simple, and you can use whatever you happen to have on hand.

The food table was pretty loaded – there were colored boiled eggs, at least four kinds of quiche, chocolate chip pancakes, raspberry scones, fresh rye rolls, pasta with chicken, fresh berries with whipped cream, and several kinds of coffee cake.  If you walked away hungry, you weren’t trying hard enough!

The kids’ play area, which is a naked teepee with some wooden furniture beneath it, was decorated with balloons.  There were at least 20 kids there, more kids than adults.  They ranged in age from about 3 years of age to young teens.

And of course, the Easter Bunny had to make an appearance (this is Klown, of course!).

My daughter did her best to make friends.

After the get-together, many people took a few minutes to put some work into their plots.  I did too, adding beet and turnip seed rows alongside the cabbage I’d planted a few days ago.

Our warm days are numbered, however, as another cold front with rain and snow is moving in for the first part of the week.  I’ll be going up to the garden tonight to put sheets over the cabbages, after I spread straw around them.  The sheets will stay on for the next few days, to protect the baby plants until the next warm day.  It looks like it will be at least Thursday before we see nice weather again.  I’m not going to complain; any moisture we get is going to be a good thing.  The cabbages will survive.

I hope you had a nice Easter weekend!

March is usually our snowiest month here in front range of the Rockies.  Last March was a disappointment.  This March?  Perfect.

We woke up to this on Saturday.

Yes, that’s my garden, where I planted lettuce seeds on Wednesday.  Yes, I knew it was going to snow.  I know exactly what I’m doing.  The snow will melt nicely over the lettuce seed I planted, and in three or four weeks, I will be eating fresh lettuce from my garden.  Even if we get more snow, or chilly nights below freezing, the lettuce will do fine.  This snow was about the best thing that could have happened to it.

The thing about snow here is that it is really not a problem.  Oh, it’s a momentary problem, while it’s snowing and blowing around and generally making a nuisance of itself, but then it quits, and the sun comes out, the streets melt, and the snow melts into the ground over the ensuing hours or days.  There are still idiots who find themselves in the ditch because they didn’t take the snow seriously when it was still coming down, but for the rest of us?  We just wait a couple hours, then head on out.  We got 8 inches of snow between Friday and Saturday night, but after only 20 minutes of hazy, thin sunshine on Saturday afternoon, our street looked like this:

I also got ambitious on Wednesday and put pumpkin and yellow butterstick squash seed in peat pots.  They won’t be ready to plant for at least 7 or 8 weeks, and that’s just fine, because it’s going to be that long before our fear of frost is past.  Nothing but a few seeds will end up in the ground before my birthday, May 23rd.

It is spring, according to the calendar.  But the weather, especially here, says otherwise.  And that’s fine.  All is as it should be.