Reading and seeding, and a dirty wet dog

When I was sick I couldn't read much, my attention span and reading comprehension were not good. Watching TV was okay, and reading the news on the internet was okay too, so they became my obsessions when I wasn't out walking with Hapi. But when all the news was the same I eventually lost my obsession with it, going hours at a time with not looking or even thinking about it. I carried on phone conversations with a few friends that were largely about telling jokes and making funny. That was good, sometimes I got off the phone hurting from laughing so much. My magazine subscriptions sustained me because the articles were short, I could put them down after only a few moments of reading.

When I got better the weather did too so I was out getting my garden ready for planting, which won't start seriously until mid-May. I started some seeds indoors and all my south and west facing window sills were littered with a mish mash of plastic containers of seeds. I save seeds year over year but I had to order a few new ones. As it turns out a whole lot of people who never gardened before are now getting ready to garden so the seed companies are inundated with orders. 

Usually I buy Vesey's seeds and they are readily available at a couple of local animal feed stores and farm markets. But this year Vesey's focussed on individual online orders and did not send any seeds to the usual stores so I had to go online too. They are over a month behind in fulfilling orders and yesterday when I went onto their website to see where they were at with shipping, there was a notice that they were no longer accepting orders. They cut it off only three days after I placed my order, so I am just barely in under the wire. I knew they'd be slow so I didn't bother ordering anything that had to be started right away.

Some of the seeds that I started were over five years old (I bought them in 2015, which means they are from the 2014 crop). Every last one of them sprouted! I wanted three plants so I planted nine seeds, and now I have nine seedlings. Yesterday I hauled a shelving unit out of the basement that I had previously attached grow lights to. It took most of the day to set up but now I can put most of the seedlings under the grow lights instead of constantly moving them from south to west windows and back again. A bit more expensive and it makes my tiny crowded living room even tinier and more crowded, but hopefully less work.

After two days of being cooped up due to very bad weather Hapi and I got out for two walks yesterday. She drove me crazy over those two days. She likes to stay outdoors during the daytime even in bad weather, but towards the later afternoon she gets very impatient with me not coming out for a walk so she is constantly at the door, in and out, tracking the mud and snow in with her. I had several towels on drying racks because each time she came in I'd try to wipe off the worst of it and the towels got soaked. It was a huge relief for both of us to get back to walking again.

Over those two days I called some friends on the west coast that I hadn't talked to in a long time. They were wanting to know about our recent mass shooting, and whether I lived near where it happened. Lately in the news they refer to it as "the rampage", which I think is an apt term. So I think I will start using it instead of "mass shooting". April 2020: the pandemic and the rampage. 

Yesterday I got a surprise phone call from another friend out west who I had neglected to call, that was really nice. She is an odd bird, but we have a lot in common and can sit around having odd conversations endlessly. She also had been sick for a long time, about a month earlier than I was. We compared notes and thought we both had the same thing but didn't know whether it was covid or not. She said that because she lives with one of her daughters and two grandchildren she wore a mask the entire time she was sick and stayed in her bedroom as much as possible. Nevertheless her daughter and grandkids did eventually come down with it too. But she said that what was odd was that while her daughter was just as sick as she was, it hardly affected the young grandkids at all.

Oh yes, I started out talking about reading and where I intended to go with that was to mention a book that I am reading now called The Invention of Yesterday, which I am very much enjoying. The author, Tamim Ansary, is an old Afghan-American hippy with a very interesting perspective on the history of human civilization, and also a good sense of humour and casual style of writing. My brother told me about this book, and I am recommending it to anyone who has an interest in such a topic.