spin the light to gold
Today I stayed late chatting with one of last year's students who stopped by to say hi and ended up hanging out for an hour processing and planning for the very full week ahead. "I should let you get some work done," she said. "This is my work," I reminded her, and she ducked her head and grinned.
Then I stayed later and made some progress clearing off my desk, which... let's just say I was unearthing conference programs and meeting agendas from 2011 and, in one corner, 2009. 2009! I felt like Eddie Izzard imitating Americans: "No one was ALIVE then!" The sentences "Why did I even keep this?" and "What the fuck was I thinking?" were uttered aloud more than once. The desk piles were about to develop geological strata; I'm surprised the paper hadn't compressed down to coal. I'm still not done cleaning -- this is the problem with cleaning my office, it's never done, there is always more paper arriving from somewhere, I feel like Sisyphus only instead of a rock uphill it's boxes of paper to the recyling bins -- but I did locate the surface of the desk, which... well. Progress where I can get it.
Walked home in the early evening light to the sound of lawnmowers rumbling under the music in my headphones, past neighbors walking dogs and colleagues pushing strollers. Tacos for dinner, chicken and chard in tomatillo-serrano sauce with queso fresco in warm corn tortillas, homemade chocolate ice cream with smoked almonds for dessert. And then I brought up the bundles of garlic from where they've been curing in the storeroom -- usually this would be an early August task but everything was three weeks late this season, it's anyone's guess whether the winter squash will ripen before frost -- and prepped them for storage: cut the stems, trimmed the roots, brushed off the dirt, separated the best bulbs for re-planting, grouped and labeled them by variety in mesh bags, packed the bags loosely in cardboard boxes to keep out the light, and took them down to the root cellar to hunker in the dark, first of this year's storage crops, first sign of autumn.
In the cellar, well into the winter, there'll be carrots and potatoes and celeriac and leeks and apples and yes, I'm still holding out hope for the squash -- the little sugar pumpkins, the baby blue hubbards. But out in the garden, now and for a few weeks yet, it's basil and corn and tomatoes and nearly-ripe peppers, bush beans drying and pole beans still podding, the second flush of raspberries coming any day now. Crickets in the dry summer twilight. The smell of melons through the open window.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
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Then I stayed later and made some progress clearing off my desk, which... let's just say I was unearthing conference programs and meeting agendas from 2011 and, in one corner, 2009. 2009! I felt like Eddie Izzard imitating Americans: "No one was ALIVE then!" The sentences "Why did I even keep this?" and "What the fuck was I thinking?" were uttered aloud more than once. The desk piles were about to develop geological strata; I'm surprised the paper hadn't compressed down to coal. I'm still not done cleaning -- this is the problem with cleaning my office, it's never done, there is always more paper arriving from somewhere, I feel like Sisyphus only instead of a rock uphill it's boxes of paper to the recyling bins -- but I did locate the surface of the desk, which... well. Progress where I can get it.
Walked home in the early evening light to the sound of lawnmowers rumbling under the music in my headphones, past neighbors walking dogs and colleagues pushing strollers. Tacos for dinner, chicken and chard in tomatillo-serrano sauce with queso fresco in warm corn tortillas, homemade chocolate ice cream with smoked almonds for dessert. And then I brought up the bundles of garlic from where they've been curing in the storeroom -- usually this would be an early August task but everything was three weeks late this season, it's anyone's guess whether the winter squash will ripen before frost -- and prepped them for storage: cut the stems, trimmed the roots, brushed off the dirt, separated the best bulbs for re-planting, grouped and labeled them by variety in mesh bags, packed the bags loosely in cardboard boxes to keep out the light, and took them down to the root cellar to hunker in the dark, first of this year's storage crops, first sign of autumn.
In the cellar, well into the winter, there'll be carrots and potatoes and celeriac and leeks and apples and yes, I'm still holding out hope for the squash -- the little sugar pumpkins, the baby blue hubbards. But out in the garden, now and for a few weeks yet, it's basil and corn and tomatoes and nearly-ripe peppers, bush beans drying and pole beans still podding, the second flush of raspberries coming any day now. Crickets in the dry summer twilight. The smell of melons through the open window.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth