The lyf so short

I might whine about how the mother-in-law demanded help in booking tickets for a concert at the local theatre in two weeks time. (The theatre has opened yesterday in compliance with regional opening laws, allowing an audience of 100 (rather than 600) people for any single event. But still?)
I might whine about how Jörg feels that his need for a beach vacation in France in July is more important than... IDK. Not travelling abroad while the pandemic is far from over? Don't ask me.

But I don't want to whine all the time, so instead, I will subject you to another garden picspam. Gardening tends to be grounding and therapeutic for me, and while looking at my gardening pictures may not be as useful for you, I will probably enjoy rambling about them, so here we go.

( Or you can just scroll away if you're not the gardening type, of course. )

And that concludes this month's tour of the garden! Tune in next month (?), when the lettuce will have gone to seed, the peas will have contracted mildew, and the brambles will, as usually, strive for world domination...

Having rambled at length about the greenhouse, I feel compelled to ramble about the garden a bit, because it's been a long time since I've done that and I don't want this journal to fall completely silent.


Besides, there's so much to ramble about. It's been a good gardening year so far. In the past years, we generally had a false spring in March, and then another cold period in April and May. This time, March was cold - uncommonly cold, in fact, with several weeks of severe (for our region) sub-zero temperatures for several days, and April started out just as icy, but when Spring finally came, it came and stayed. This was a bit difficult because processes that usually take place across one and a half months were now rolled up in two weeks, but on the plus side, no trees blossomed only to freeze a few days later. Sure, it all started later than normal... but it caught up.



Mid-May to Mid-June. The incredibly stable scaffolds are meant to provide the pumpkin plants with an opportunity for growth. The wooden frames (no longer visible in the second pic) in theory enable me to twice the number of potatoes that would normally be possible on a patch that size. You can add another frame whenever the plants grow out of the earth (as often as geometry and your arm length allow).



Brussels sprouts look ridiculous when they're going to seed. (OK they always look ridiculous.)



The kids are getting into mischief and snacking on the first ripe currants.



In theory, this is the patch for herbs and medicinal plants. In practice, I'll probably have to move them because I need more veggie patches. Garden planning is four-dimensional...



I keep trying to grow broad beans because they're such a classic, but they're not doing particularly well in my garden. The leafy goosefoot is finally doing well though. (What an ugly name. In German, it's called strawberry spinach, which describes it a lot better, because it's like... a spinach plant that grows red berries?) For years, I treated it as a weed until I read somewhere that it was an old vegetable plant, and then I tried to get it to grow again and it was sulking. But last year I got a few plants to grow and ripen, and their offspring clearly feels welcome again.



Yeah, you know what plants have coped really well with this year's Himring winter? Figs. Szechuan pepper. The mulberry tree.
You know what hasn't? Leeks. Beetroots. Most cabbages. The irony is not lost on me.



In case you were wondering, I keep my crops mixed on purpose. Firstly, because I don't have much space and if I used every patch for a monoculture, I wouldn't be able to grow half the stuff I want to grow. Second, because a lot of plants actually influence each other in positive ways, either because they use completely different nutrients or use space differently or exude hormones that the other plants need or discourage various pests. Mind you, there are also plants that vage war on each other. Onions don't do well next to (or right after) legumes, for instance. I have made a long and clever list (not my own research! I'm relying on the work of the Benedictine nuns in Fulda, because they've got the time for this kind of stuff) of good patch partners and bad patch partners and necessary crop rotations. But there are always surprises that the good nuns haven't listed. Probably because they work more tidily than yours truly and don't accidentally leave potatoes in the soil in autumn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



I love my heritage peas. It is completely beyond me why people ever thought it was necessary to breed edible peas with boring white flowers, and inedible sweetpeas with lovely colourful flowers. Get you a plant that can do both!



Potato pyramids. As you can see, the wooden frames are by now completely covered in potato foliage.



The beans are coming along OK (they only germinated two weeks ago). The beetroots are more interested in growing foliage and flowering than making nice round bulbs this year. Pffff.



Chickpeas and amaranth, because sometimes I am an experimental gardener (TM). Visible in the back: two nectarines that started growing in the compost a few years ago. I put them into the regular garden with no protection other than the wall behind them, and they've been dealing with our harsh (TM) climate just fine so far. Sometimes I suspect that a lot of plants are a lot more versatile than agricultural lore lets on.



Yeah, I grow some cereal on my tiny patches. It started as an accident (some oats started growing after I used horse droppings as manure; some barley and buckwheat started growing around the bird feeding station. Yeah, I know buckwheat isn't a cereal, but it's used like one, so whatever), but now I'm doing it on purpose. It's not enough for any serious kind of use, but it's fun and decorative and I can waste my gardening space in whatever manner I see fit, so there!



As you can see, not all of my patches are doing so well.



Being done with the currants, the kids are now looking for woodland strawberries. - I'm still super proud of what I did with what once used to be a grassy slope that was next to impossible to mow. No more lawn-mowing necessary on the perennial patch! Take that! (And yeah, we still have to restore those stairs... and the wall.)



The kids didn't want to wait until Drachenfest to go camping, so we pitched the tent in the backyard. Why sleep in your bed when you can sleep on the lawn? (To be fair, during the hot past weeks, the night air was a lot more pleasant in the tent than it was in our living room. And we were treated to an absolutely spectacular light show when the heat and humidity finally exploded in a nightly thunderstorm!)

- - -

There, wasn't that fun! For me. Hurr hurr.

In other news, I'll be teaching ten hours of English and four hours of Geography at the Secondary School after the summer holidays. Pretty sure this was the right decision. It's only half the classes (and thus, half the money) I would've done at the Elementary School, but let's be honest, the latter would probably have been five times the stress at only twice the pay. So it's probably the right decision. (Feeling guilty on behalf of the children at the Elementary School though. Damn it.)

A pic a day is not feasible for me, but in order to keep posting, I'll try to do a picspam (or at least a single pic to ramble about?) per week. We'll see how that goes!

We've been having snow, on and off, all year (haha). That is, it's been snowing, then it's been staying for a day or two, then it's melted away, then it's been freezing, and then it started to snow again. No big cumulative masses of snow, just enough to delight the kids, powder the landscape and cause a couple of unnecessary accidents on the roads.

Today is another snow day. But as I've already posted several snow picspams in past years, I won't do one (now, anyway). Instead, have some pics of the cold spell that hit us last week. We weren't hit as badly as some other regions - never less than -10°C - but we've had some very pretty frost in the garden. Which is as good an excuse as any to show off my measly attempts at keeping a garden in the first place. ;)

( Here be lots of pics )

Things are looking very different today, all underneath a nice cover of snow (like so). But showing you snow wouldn't have allowed me to ramble about the garden so much. So yeah. Now I'll go fetch firewood because while it's warmer than last week, it's still pretty cold...

Before the past months disappear entirely in the mists of nursing dementia and/or being busy, I'll try to post at least a few things. Not at the length they deserve (probably) but hey, better than nothing, right?

~ Life without the tenants from hell continues to be a relief. On the minus side, we can't start renovating the flat (which they left, unsurprisingly, in a mess. Not quite as dreadful as we expected -- nonetheless, there's something to do in every room) before we haven't settled what part of the damage they have to pay for. An exception is the kitchen, which was in a less-than-stellar state even before they moved in (fugly tiles, mix-and-don't-match plug sockets and switches, wallpaper that's been painted five times), so we kept that off the damage list. Accordingly, the past week was used for removing the tiles and wallpaper - and, on my side, with the help of an interior design program try to get all the mother-in-law's kitchen furniture into the new room. (Which is larger than her old kitchen, but as the door and kitchen are in the middle of the walls rather than at two different ends of the room, there's a little less space for cupboards.) It was kind of like playing "The Sims", just without the little people and their silly little needs!

~ Mother-in-law is helping nobody by panicking. OMG SHE HAS TO MOVE HOUSE. BY SEPTEMBER. IT IS ALREADY JUNE. WE WILL NEVER MAKE IT. On the other hand, instead of already packing stuff that she doesn't currently need (like winter clothing? Or the majority of her books? Or car stuff?) and bringing it over bit by bit, she keeps driving to and fro without a single box in her trunk. Le sigh. I wouldn't mind if we didn't have the same discussions over and over again about how OMG THERE IS NO TIME vs. YES THERE IS TIME BUT WHY DON'T YOU JUST START every other day.
Mind you, she is being exceedingly helpful by babysitting a lot, so I actually manage to look after the garden and bees and stuff on a more or less regular basis, so I shouldn't grouch! And the fact that she's moving in next door means that we can now use the full extent of our grounds (except for the meadow that's rented out to people with horses, but as I don't (yet!) have any animals that I'd want to put there, that's OK. Felix can now get a swingset for his birthday!

~ The "babies" are growing. Oh so much. It is shameful that Julian is two months old today and I haven't posted a single picspam or baby accomplishment update since right after his birth, I know! For the moment, suffice it to say that he is still a very good-natured, patient little fellow. He only wakes me once at night (sometimes, as late as 6 am!) to drink and otherwise sleeps until around 8! He can actually spend a while in his cradle rather than needing constant physical contact! He has an amazing (well, for his age) attention span - he can spend more than half an hour looking at his suspended toys (and making sweet little noises at them) and waving his arms! He smiles and grins a lot and interacts very nicely. He has grown rather more chubby than Felix ever was!

~ Meanwhile, Felix can now reproduce all (capital) letters and numbers in handwriting. His fascination for numbers continues, but to my delight he also likes playing with language now - be it "words starting with a particular letter" ("P is for Papa! And Pampers! And Post!"), or replacing all the vowels with a single one, or rhymes, or telling little stories by quoting lines from his books and replacing the names. He can express himself really well (aside from some difficulties in pronouncing consonant clusters), so I sometimes forget that he is, well, not quite three years old yet and I shouldn't expect the logical and analytical facilities of a five-year-old. So I'm sometimes quite unfairly expecting that he'll understand (or even anticipate) things that are well beyond his grasp. Poor no-longer-baby-but-still-very-young-child!
He has taken up thumbsucking since Julian arrived, to our slight annoyance. Towards his little brother, he is still very loving (if a bit overbearing, and sometimes too rough-and-ready for my comfort).
He'll start attending Kindergarten in August. I'm very curious how that's going to go.

~ Bees are also thriving. I do hope I'll get the main colony through summer without swarming - they haven't, so far, but only because I took away brood to make fledgling colonies. Now three of my four boxes are in use, and I'd like to keep the fourth empty just in case of... whatever. After Midsummer, they should in theory breed less and stop wanting to swarm either way, but I'm not sure I can rely on it. (Remember, I got this colony because it was an August swarm. August is well after Midsummer!) On the other hand, I don't want to give them an additional breeding box at this point because they'll likely just use it to mix honey and brood, which means I can't easily get the honey out, and aside from the fact that I WANT HONEY, it's also actually unhealthy for them to keep honeydew honey in winter (it tends to give them diarrhea. Too much honeydew honey was likely what killed my very first colonies.), and July and August are when there's the most honeydew. Blah blah nobody's reading anymore at any rate, I just have to hope that they won't swarm while I'm away. I gave them an additional honey super today so hopefully that'll keep them busy and convince them that there's enough room and no need to swarm. -- The first fledgling has been queen-right for about two weeks now. Yay! In the second fledgling, the new queen apparently didn't return, but as I had a lot of brood in the main colony and had to do something about that anyway, I gave them a frame full of young brood last week and they've started to make new queen cells. Hopefully, one of those new queens will manage to get laid and find her way back to the colony...

~ The garden is doing what it wants. Some plants are growing well, others are not growing at all. I've given up trying to encourage them, and just scrapped the intercropping plans I lovingly made last winter. They've been ruined anyway because all sorts of people dropped their potatoes off with us before they went on their Easter vacation. I don't know why anybody believes that it's a good idea to buy 40 kg of potatoes in SPRING. Yes, they're getting cheaper, but that's because they're due to germinate. Which most of them promptly did. Even more stupid if you know you're going on vacation soon... Oh well. I had to make additional patches to plant all those germinated (= no longer edible) potatoes but, unless the potato blight or potato beetle visit us, we'll probably get enough "new" potatoes to last all winter. We just didn't get to eat any of them in Spring. :P

~ Childbed time is officially over. (Mind you, this time it was child-kitchen and child-garden, anyway.) Aside from my flabby belly and the still-present scar in my nethers, I feel much as ever, too. No paranoia about prolapsing wombs this time, thank God! Fitness is returning, too (as much as can be asked for without actual training).

~ Truth in LaCE: I've observed that after the birth of both my children, I had absolutely no mind for creativity. Or fiction - not my own - in general! Like, not just "no time", but genuinely "no mind" - I honestly couldn't care for the lives and times of made-up people. If I hadn't regularly had to read up stuff for the Silmarillion re-read, I'd only have consumed gardening books, travelogues and the beekeeping primer in the past two months. After Felix' birth, this state lasted for almost half a year, but this time, it ended last week. As a result, I was swamped by plotbunnies: For two The Tempered Steel spin-offs, for that Nerdanel-and-Anairë story I started for the B2MeM Bingo two years ago, for Golden Days, for - good grief! - Wardens of the North (a.k.a. TTS Two). And oh, there's year-before-last's NaNo which I also meant to re-work...
So we've firmly left "no mind" territory and are back in "no time" territory.

~ But before any progress can be made on any front, we're going on vacation. No, we're still broke! But my parents, in a clever bid to spend more time with their grandchildren, have rented a holiday home in Denmark and have invited us along. We just have to get there by ourselves. (About five hours by car.) So I'll see the sea soon! (When we bought new sandals for Felix a few weeks back, he - to our great surprise - actually tried them on without complaining. Then when we'd found a pair that fit, he declared - to the delight of the shop assistants - "NOW we can go to the beach!" Soon, sweety. Not quite yet...)

And that concludes your hurried update. Off to make black-and-redcurrant jelly. And dinner. I've become such a housewife. :P

You'd think that stones in a garden get smaller over time. By friction, by invasive roots, by gardening tools, whatever. Smaller. Not bigger. Right?

When I started to turn the garden back into a garden, I hoed the ground and took out all larger and not-so-large rocks. The little ones, eh, there were too many of those to bother, and besides, they'd get smaller over time.
Now today I took out the last remaining potatoes because we're supposed to get serious frosts this week (which doesn't hurt the potatoes per se, but makes them inedible), and... I found stones. So many stones. Oh, so many BIG FAT lumps of rock.

I took all of them out two years ago! And then last year I picked out all I'd overlooked! And now there were all these rocks again! Seriously! Did they grow throughout the year? Must have! They weren't there in Spring! I HAVE A GARDEN THAT GROWS NEW ROCKS.

... I don't know how the newly grown rocks manage to have fossilised shells in them, but. I'm sure I can find a friendly creationist who explains how that happens. All I know is that I REMOVED ALL THESE FRICKING ROCKS AND THEY GREW BACK.
(This in a region that doesn't feature tectonic upheavals.)

Most of the potatoes were tiny. No wonder, since they were late to grow, then got too little rain, then got enough rain but too late... and oh, of course THERE WERE ALL THOSE FREAKIN' ROCKS HAMPERING THEIR GROWTH.

That's it; I'm giving up gardening.




Well, for this year, anyway.

April picspam, to be precise. This April was a funny month (... as Aprils are wont to be, really, so why am I surprised?),
starting out like this:



and ending like this:



And in between...

( Lenten is come... below the cut for your convenience. )

And then it turned May. Anyway, Spring has sprung after all! About time, too. Yesterday, I gave the bees an additional box, purely for honey (i.e., with a grid in between so the queen can't get in. No queen, no eggs.). Not because I have any illusions that they'll give me much honey this spring, but because they were starting to build wild combs on top of their frames. For no good reason - they have empty frames enough yet! But their instinct is to store honey above their brood, and apparently, that means they want to build upwards even when they have a lot of space sideways. As long as there's no brood sideways, there's no point storing honey there? I don't know. I'm not a bee after all. I just hope that they'll stop building nonsense now that they have a whole storey just for honey. We'll see!

... and we actually had a drought this March. Not that anyone noticed because it was so effing cold, but apparently our region got only 50% of the rainfall it normally gets in March? Well, 50% of rainfall in the shape of snow, but whatever. Only half our normal ration of water-from-the-sky-in-whatever-form.

Anyway, now that April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, etc. etc., there's so much to do in the garden (and didn't I mean to blog more about my gardening?) that you have no time to talk about it.

Short version is short:
- turned the compost (well, 2/3 of it so far)
- fought the everlasting battle against the brambles
- pruned our hazel bushes. I know you're supposed to do that sooner! But I wanted my bees to be able to use the hazel flower, since nothing else was properly in bloom yet. Now the hazel is through and the willows start blooming, I could cut back the hazels. As a result, they bled quite a bit (>_>) but I'm sure they're gonna survive.
- started fixing the flower/veggie beds in the garden - the ground is sloping so everything keeps slipping slightly downwards across time. Now I'm trying to fix it all in sort of terraces so the slope is no longer an issue. TAKES AGES.
- prepared the first veggie beds (removing mulch, weeding, etc.)
Now I have to wait for my starter cultures to grow strong enough, and for the arrival of the potatoes (white, purple and red) that I ordered. And prepare the remaining beds, sow stuff, transplant stuff, weed weed weed, mow the lawn, continue working on the terraces, stock up the bee-hive...
It's a good thing that motivation levels are high after such a long winter. I hope they last a while.

Felix absolutely loves the outdoors and mostly doesn't want to return inside ever again. He plays with stones, sticks, waterbuckets, balances on walls (with help), climbs up stairs (with help), and occasionally drags us on long walks through the forest. He generally does most of the walking himself. You can accuse him of being stubborn, but certainly not of being lazy.

We've discovered a new phase in human development, however. I call it the "house-elfin phase": Felix raises a fuss whenever you try to dress him (even when it is NOT warm), is obsessed with socks, and when something doesn't go as he wants, he hits his head against the floor or against convenient pieces of furniture. I know I should not be laughing, but I'm sorry, it really, really reminds me of Dobby the house-elf!

Alles Liebe nachträglich zum Geburtstag, fusselbiene,
und Herzlichen Glückwunsch, zorn und joyful_molly!
It also appears to be Neil Gaiman's birthday. And the first day of carnival. And Martinmas, of course! Next year, I'll probably start attending Martinmas parades again. That I'm actually looking forward to - Martinmas was one of my favourite feasts as a child, but alas, at some point you're too old to go a-parading and a-wassailing with a lantern unless you have to accompany and protect someone younger...
Oh, and it's poppy day too, eh? Well, let rest their quarrel with the foe. It's a new world after all.
Finally, thanks to shadowbrides for pointing this out, it's clearly Elf day! Why? Because in German (OR Dutch), the word for "11" is spelled and pronounced elf, and today is 11-11-11.
Do something elf-y today! (No pun intended, elfy). I did - I finally uploaded two pieces of CfL art (oh, that takes us back...) to my dA. (heartofoshun, I still owe you one, btw... otherwise, laurenia gets her chance if she's still interested!)

- - -

Saw the first episode of the American Borgia series yesterday. After watching the European Borgia series just a few weeks ago (well played, ZDF), this is the weirdest thing ever, what with everyone being the same person but played by different actors, and with the story told in a different way (or with a focus on completely different episodes). My brother said (when the European series was running) that he much preferred the American version. I don't think I do, in spite of Jeremy Irons. So far, the story feels terribly rushed. Lucrezia is badly over-acted in both versions (though the European was even worse). It's funny that the same period in history can look so completely different, clothing-wise. I'm tempted to research which version is truer to actual costume history; somehow the American version feels too modern, but who knows! I don't care enough about the political history to research which version is taking less liberties with that...
What absolutely, utterly made me laugh and point my finger in disdain at the American version, however, was the coronation of Alexander VI. WITH HÄNDEL'S "ZADOK THE PRIEST" PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND. I am not kidding you. Zadok the Priest. That British coronation anthem. I may be wrong there, but I always thought that they wouldn't have 18th century music in 15th century Rome. But maybe that's just me. At any rate, that was the most ridiculous choice ever. There surely are hundreds of festive anachronistic anthems one could've chosen, instead of taking one that so many people will recognise (... right? right?). I mean... Zadok the Priest. Dude. Dude.

On the whole: Unwise of our tv channels to show two different versions based on the same historical events so shortly after one another. (They're two different channels.) Unwise of me to watch them like that, too, of course - but our recorder hard-disk is almost full, so now we have to watch and delete stuff as fast as we can or it'll stop recording! :P (You'd think a terabyte would last a while, and then suddenly it's all full. It's like having a huge barn - you'd think 200 m² will always give you loads of spare room, and four years of building later everything's full of junk, tools and materials...) [/aside]

What also made me laugh out loud, but for personal reasons, was Lucrezia's "seahorse" scene. Not because of her stupidity, but because of the seahorse pendant. See, a looong time ago in a RPG, our group had to steal a seahorse pendant from the Vatikan archives. IT WAS THAT SEAHORSE I'M SURE.

In garden news, yesterday I actually managed to do two hours of weeding while Felix babbled (later on, slept) warmly wrapped in his bouncing cradle. Maybe we'll manage to do that today, too, as the sun has just come out, which means it won't be quite so ghastly cold outside.
On the whole, this late fall is much sunnier than all summer was this year, but there is so much work to do in the garden that I probably won't manage to do it before the first snows come. (We've been told that about three weeks after New York gets the first snows, we can expect snow around here. No idea if that's true. If it is, that'd give us one more week...)

In Felix news, he's growing nicely and learning new things every day. His latest accomplishment is grabbing things and pushing them into his mouth. I'll make a doudou doll (security blanket doll, Schnuffelpuppe, whatever you want to call it) for him and hope that he'll like it. (Perhaps if I carry it around in my bra for a while...?) So far he seems more interested in things that the grown-ups use (cleaning rags, plates, newspapers) than in toys actually designed for his use. Oh well. He also feels comfortable sitting on my lap while turned away from me (as opposed to sitting on my lap facing me) so he can watch the cats, his daddy, the fireplace or whatever else is going on - or, at table, so he can try to grab a plate and push it around. When he is lying on his belly, he'll try to move forward but doesn't yet manage it --- his movements look like he's trying breaststroke swimming, which, alas, doesn't work on a blanket! (Perhaps I should take baby-"swimming" classes with him?) Sometimes he's lucky and manages to push off something firm (a wall; my legs) so he actually moves forward. Most of the time, he just turns in circles. A few times he rolled over onto his back, but so far it seems to be an accidental side-effect of trying to move forward rather than a succesful attempt to roll over.
At nights, alas, he still wakes and cries frequently. By now I'm happy if he only cries for food every three hours.
The last weekend we visited relatives in Jena. My aunt said (to Jörg, not me) that it was no wonder Felix cried so much if we always reacted at once - "he's got you trained!". At the same time she agrees that babies of Felix' age aren't mentally capable of associating a certain behaviour or action with something else, so he can neither be trained (yet) not train us (yet). Why she does not notice the inconsistency, I do not know.
But the trip was fun. A little picspam may follow.

Next week he'll get his first vaccination shots. It's funny - I'm not afraid of needles myself, but feel uncomfortable about Felix getting his shots. Mostly because he doesn't understand the need and purpose of them yet, though. If I could explain it to him, everything would be fine. (I'll explain it anyway, though - I just know he won't understand it! :P)

NaNo-wise, I'm sooo behind. I can't even be bothered to care, which is quite relaxing. When I have time to write, I write. Unless I don't feel like it, in which case I'll read or sew. If I have a chance to do the laundry or the dishes or the garden or some cleaning, I'll do that. If I don't manage to write 50.000 words in a month, oh well. Motherhood is such a re-arranger of priorities...

... or rather "somethings", but that's ungrammatical, so.

* The date for next year's Drachenfest has been announced and against all odds it's not at the same time as the Mittelerdefest, but a week later! I've been waiting for - and dreading - the announcement because it was pretty likely that both events would fall around the same weekend and then I'd have had to decide for just one (that is, for the MEF...). As I'm already missing this year's DF for obvious reasons, that'd have been very sad. So yay for actually being able (time-wise; anything else we'll see) to do both! \o/

* Five of my stories have been nominated for this year's MEFAs. To be sure, with the majority of them I'm pretty much certain they don't stand a chance - one might just get lucky, it's got Fingon in it and contains no overly complicated or controversial concepts, which always makes for crowd-pleasers - but it's still nice people liked them well enough to nominate them. Of course, as in past years, there are some stories where I'd secretly hoped someone would nominate them and nobody did (I tell myself that of course people loved them but didn't remember just now because they're old stuff :P), and as I despise self-nomination and fail at self-advertising, I'll just have to suck that up. Ah well. Five noms is still awesome, particularly as I've been a very unproductive fanficcer these past months.

* Today I managed to catch up with my gardening plan for the kitchen part of the garden, i.e. I managed to finish weeding all nine veggie patches and sow everything that had to be sown by June. As it's still June (if just barely), I consider this a splendid success. We'll see whether I'll manage to take care of the rest of the garden soonish, too, but there's less pressure - although all those spreading weeds are a pest, they're not interfering with anything important. Now I just have to harvest and use up the redcurrants and blackcurrants, as well as all those ripe woodland strawberries. And figure out what to do with my surplus tomato plants - this year, I actually have too many. (When you sow tomatoes, you bring out at least twice as many seeds as you want plants, because usually at least half of them won't grow anyway. This year, all of them grew, and two so powerfully that I had to take slippings, and these slippings in turn all took root, and then I got another plant from the uphill neighbour which I couldn't politely refuse, so now I have rather more plants than I bargained for -- which I guess is good, but I have to re-think my initial plans to make room for all of them.) Eh well, if they all manage to bring me ripe tomatoes, I shan't complain further!

* Am having an "actionism!" phase. Unfortunately it's neither typical nesting ("CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!") nor fannish actionism, but rather (mostly LARPish... it's that time of the year) creative stuff for which I lack the materials or skillz or both. Might nonetheless be tempted to try. At any rate, motivation is a good thing, even if it's kinda pointless motivation. Particularly if it's motivation for something other than sewing (current creative project of choice is "Pimp my cheap IKEA nursing bag!", which will result in something reasonably awesome, but my sewing finger is pretty raw by now, so I'll need a break after that). So there we go.

* Oh and I made carrot cake yesterday, with some variations from the original recipe (WTF what kind of crazy person puts ground apricot kernels into a cake? Don't those contain, like, Prussic acid?) and from my first attempt at the recipe (which was tasty enough but kinda dry). Added more baking powder, replaced apricot kernels with sweet almonds (I just trust those more, 'k?), replaced maize grits with just more "normal" flour (well, wholemeal spelt flour, but that's still more normal than maize grits :P), added chopped apple. Refused to mess around with the eggs as the recipe demanded (in the original recipe, you're supposed to separate the whites from the yolks, beat the whites, beat the yolks and mix them with all the other ingredients, then put the beaten whites back in. I assume this is supposed to make the cake fluffy or something, but as I said it was pretty dry nonetheless. So this time around I just put the eggs in whole from the start (I mean, without the shells, clearly, but whites and yolks together, yes?) because I hate separating eggs and certainly won't do it if it doesn't serve some sort of point. And I even used less eggs than the recipe called for because I only had two eggs left and our uphill neighbours' chickens had an unproductive week. AND IT WAS AWESOME. Not the least bit dry, instead sweet and fruity and juicy. Despite the spelt flour, too! Screw you, absurdly complicated recipe with your weird ingredients. I MADE YOU SIMPLER AND BETTER.

And that concludes today's random joyspam. Not a "Five things that made me happy" meme participant, but it might as well be...

After we'd been promised (threatened with?) rain last weekend and this week's Monday and Tuesday, yesterday it actually did rain. It is also raining today. This is a good thing because we haven't had proper rain in three weeks. Our rainwater cistern was empty! In March! In Bergia! I ask you! We had to go back to using tap water for flushing the toilet and for the washing machine! Such horror! Such waste! And after preparing the ("useful plants part") garden so nicely, I almost would've had to water it! In March! In Bergia! Incredible thing. Well, now it's raining - rather softly but it's raining. On second thought, the soft rain is a good thing too, because I made a low earth bank on one end of the garden and planted it with wild raspberries and, because it was so dry, I doubt they had a chance to dig their roots in deep enough to steady the bank. So hard rain would probably wash it all away. In conclusion: yay.

I've been pregnant for 26 weeks now. Half a year. That's really rather surreal. Ok, actually it's 24 weeks (they start counting on the first day of the last period, so there's two "idle" weeks), but still.
I signed up for an antenatal class at the local hospital, which will start in two weeks' time. I hope that won't be too embarrassing. On the other hand, as everyone present (aside from the midwife) is sort of in the same situation, I expect we'll all be equally afraid of doing something wrong. ^^ At any rate, I'm curious how that'll go! Next week Jörg and I will go and check out the same hospital's delivery ward. In our case this is mostly just a formality: We don't really intend to check all sorts of locations (as apparently some parents do). We're just going to see whether the local place looks sufficiently nice. Unless it's really off-putting, that's pretty much it. At any rate, our hospital's OB ward has a good reputation, so... yeah. But it's good to see the place in advance, I expect.
(My mom is very anxious for us to go to a hospital rather than try anything funny at home. My grandmother keeps insisting that birthing at home is so much better because she gave birth to two children at home and everything was fine and then the third was born in a hospital and everything was horrible. Which may be true, but a) it wasn't a difficult birth because she was in hospital, but rather she was taken to the hospital because it threatened to be a difficult birth; and b) this is the 21st century, not the 1960s. There's rooming-in these days and no more "cuddling is BAD for babies, don't touch unless absolutely necessary!" even in hospitals. Honestly. And lastly, the last thing I want to worry about - and something I know I would worry about if I were to give birth at home - is whether everything's clean enough or what the midwife thinks about our furniture arrangement and stuff. It's absurd, I know, but I'm ridiculously insecure that way and I don't need that on top of the already sufficiently pain- and stressful business. I'll keep that for fanfic, thank you very much. (Poor Nerdanel.) Hospital it is.)
So far things have been almost ridiculously easy - no trouble at all aside from breast pains in the first months, and occasional shortness of breath now. No sickness, no oedema, no stretch marks - so far. Of course that makes me sort of paranoid because it's too good to be true and there's bound to be trouble at some point... :p

My honeybees did, alas, none of them survive this winter. (Hurrah, I have something in common with Neil Gaiman! But unlike Neil Gaiman, I'm not going to import Russian bees believing that'll make things better. Actually importing bees from Russia is what started all the varroa trouble over here, but I assume they're already having varroa trouble in the States anyway, so I guess now it doesn't matter. Anyway.) This is not a good thing. But thanks to our carpenter we found someone who is selling a couple of (fully-fledged) colonies for €50 apiece, which is really cheap, normally you pay about thrice that price. Apparently, his colonies were so strong last year that he got to make several new starter colonies to make up for the usual winter losses, except that he didn't have winter losses, and now he's running out of garden space. Good for me. So if this works out, I'll soon have one new colony. And if they behave at my place like they behaved at his, I may be able (or even forced to) make a couple of starter colonies, and so it goes on.
Incidentally, our willows have never blossomed as beautifully as they do this year. And no honeybees yet. :( On plus side, wild bees and bumblebees of various kinds are already all busy.

We have mice in the intermediate ceiling. That is not good. We were warned when we bought the house that our predecessors had problems with mice, but when we (and, probably more relevantly, our two cats) moved in, no mice were to be found inside. Last year our tenants noted the pitter-patter of little mice feet in their ceiling, though, and (oddly enough, NOW that it's getting warmer outside) a few days ago they apparently made it across to our part of the house. Of course they're staying in the ceilings where the cats can't reach them. So we'll have to take down the ceilings and block all potential mouse-passages. Hurrah, yet another project. We also have to make some changes to the lovely new cesspit, because basically the local environmental office don't believe in basic physics*. Don't ask me why in Germany environmentalism so often comes paired with a complete ignorance of natural sciences. I really don't know.
Outside, the cats do continue to hunt, catch and kill mice. Yesterday, however, they caught a bat instead. I assume something must have been wrong with the bat because otherwise the cats presumably wouldn't have caught it, but still. Such a cute bat, and it was screeching for a long time before the cats actually killed it. ;_;

As of today, I am officially exmatriculated. Although the past two semesters at university basically just felt like "I hate this place, can I please be done now", now that I'm done I feel kinda wistful. And I'm gonna miss the free bus pass. :p Oh well. Once I've forgotten my annoyance about the silly rituals of academia, I can always try to go back for a Ph.D., right? I'll need one for pretty much all the jobs I'm interested in, anyway. *le sigh* (It's silly, really. Sometimes I look at job offers for lousy internships or traineeships and they want Ph.Ds and years of professional experience and years spent abroad and whatnot. I wonder whether people with Ph.Ds and years of professional experience (in the relevant field!) actually put up with under-paid internships or two-year traineeships. If they do, I hate them, because they ruin the market for the people such internships and traineeships actually should be aimed at. Gnah gnah. End entitlement whining here.)

To end on a positive note, yesterday I was given a surprise!present. I'd gone to the same local photographer who'd taken our wedding pictures, this time for job application pictures. I put this off for a long time (as you can see) because I hate having pictures taken of me. My face is, alas, the part of my body that I am least fond of, and as that's sort of the prominent part in such pictures (I mean, I can hardly send a photo of my awesome biceps, no?), I really really didn't want to have to deal with all that. But now the application deadline for an internship I'd really like to get (and that doesn't require a Ph.D....) is coming closer, I sort of couldn't avoid it anymore. (Yes, in Germany you still have to put a picture on your CV. No, it is pointless to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of that custom on my journal.) So I actually put on some make-up (urgh urgh urgh) and went to the photographer. Another childhood trauma; back in school, a photographer came to take passport & class pictures every two years, and the one who came to our school was a slimebag. (This seems to be common). But this photographer is very nice, the wedding pictures she took of us were lovely, so I figured if anyone could manage anything useful, she'd be the one. And eventually we did manage pictures in which I do not look too little-girly or otherwise goofy, hurrah. And we had a nice chat, too. And in the end, she said, "You know, I had these wedding pictures of you and your husband in my exhibition for a while." Which I did indeed know, because of course she asked our permission first. And then she said, "But I have to replace them with new pictures now. You know what, why don't I give them to you?" Which she then did. For free. Framed and all.
And I don't even look too goofy in them. :p
This was no doubt a clever move on her part ("They'll remember that when the time comes for cutesy baby photos") but still nice. So there.

Standard disclaimer: Everything in this post is (to the best of my knowledge) true, despite today's date. Hope you haven't fallen for any dirty tricks elsewhere! Last year I totally fell for something because it was posted on March 31st so I wasn't yet cautious about what I believed. Turned out the poster was sitting in Australia where it was already April 1st. Anyway. No foolish fish here.

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*Sort of like my "favourite" Trittin quote.
"Sir, that is in direct contradiction to Ohm's law." - "Laws can be changed!"