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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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8:50 p.m. - 2005-05-28
After we took the kid to the show we wandered the mall. I kept catching sight of myself in the many many mall mirrors. Dis-enheartening. I've got to get more exercise. I know I'm eating more than I did last year. But I'd skated right up to a nice little eating disorder and I am NOT going back to that insane 'diet' again. During the worst of it a typical week's consumption was 2 clementines, a sliced cuke with low-fat dressing, and 3 bowls of soup. I'm not kidding. 2 or 3 days would go by and the only calories came from my tea. It had started to become necessary to deny myself food. Nope. Nuh uh. Not going there. So exercise it is. Besides, that's what I really need. Everything is wiggly and thick. Starving might shrink things a little, but it's exercise that's going to really whittle the wigglies off. To that end I went out and did some hardcore gardening today. The kind that involves lugging heavy things, a lot of bend and stretch, and a truly stupid amount of soil cultivating. My wrists ache. I worked 5 bags of soil into the veggie patch and the perennial garden. On hands and knees with a trowel. And I'm not talking those dinky bags either. The huge ones. Comparable to the size of a 50lb bag of dog food. Only dirt is heavier than Alpo. I'll be paying for this tomorrow. The gardens look great though. I planted some foxgloves. They're supposed to be perennials, but I haven't seen any signs of life from last year's foxgloves. A few entries back I talked about not being big on learning practical arts from books. True enough, but I do look stuff up when I have a specific question. I want to find out if there's anything I should be doing to make the foxgloves re-seed or come up from root stock again. Maybe they are bi-annual like hollyhocks. That'll be a nice treat for next year then. Also planted radishes and pumpkins. Feels awfully late to be planting seeds. The weather had just been too iffy. I know a lot of Northeastern folks were unhappy with having October weather in May. Not me. Except for the cold doing a number on my garden I enjoyed the cool temps. A cold spring really isn't that much of an anomaly around here. I have a very specific memory of meeting some friends one night and all of us were wearing leather jackets. (No, we weren't a gang of Fonzie worshippers, it was just that cold.) I distinctly remember saying, "Can you believe this? We're all in leather and Memorial Day is next weekend!" That was 11 years ago. Ever since I've kept an eye on the late spring weather. As it happens 6 out the last 10 springs were cold enough to warrant outerwear on the weekend before Memorial Day. So quitcher bitchin', a cool spring is normal. At least half the time. Think of our poor parched brethren in the southwest. Triple digit temps already. Come July people's houses are going to start melting. Alex is off at a weekend house party. There may be drinks and drugs, but I don't worry about that with Alex. The kid is as abstemious as a parson. The real draw for him was that this was a gamers' party. RPG's, video games, various Net dorkiness. I am very grateful I don't have to worry about Alex rolling home with a hangover, an STD or a drug habit. Still it's amusing to me that my kid went all the way out to the wilds of PA to play Nintendo. Younger nephew is the same way. SIL and I had been privately marveling over our own purple hazy school days and the punishing amount of booze we consumed and here were our kids whose big parties revolved around Play Station and Texas Hold 'Em. Then Elder nephew started showing up at family to-do's quite worse for wear. Looks like Elder nephew takes after the previous generation. It's obvious he's on speaking terms with Jim and Jack and their pal Jager. And as Prof. Henry Hill would say, "There's THC and that rhymes with P and that stands for party and party means school." I can't say SIL is pleased, but she's not quite as shocked and appalled as one might expect either. Not that she'd actually tell him that. Early on in our parenting careers she and I had discussed how to broach our semi-misspent youth with our children. We both decided to be honest, but only if they asked. No need to volunteer what Mom was up to in the 70's. It wasn't required that we offer our goose sauce to our young ganders. Fortunately our boys are not very curious. Besides, our past is nowhere near as interesting as their present. In fact if we want some privacy all we have to do is turn to the boys and say, "Now back when we were in high school…" and they run like bunnies. I'm going to drag my rapidly stiffening bod into a long hot shower now. Send a kind word to the gal who loves her garden not wisely, but too well. ~LA
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