I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper ( Read more... )

Alright. I'm not used to having a normal experience of something, but I may be having a normal experience of autism, now, as an adult, that many people are more used to having their whole lives.

So a meme went around a bit ago. The text was:

people think taking things literally is just like

-not getting jokes and sarcasm

when in my experience it's ( Read more... )

Social: how do I keep or create community when social media is a problem for me/I like its reminders of folks I know

Time use/work life balance: Assuming 9 hours for sleeping, 2.5 hours for cooking & eating, 8 hours of working, 30 minutes of laundry and toothbrushing, that leaves 4 hours for administrative details, friendship, hobbies, house ( Read more... )

I've renewed my mortgage here. In Canada you have to renew your mortgage every 5 years at whatever the interest rate at the time is, even if it's supposed to be a 20 year mortgage or whatever. I'm not sure why they do that, but they do.

Benefit of living out here where I do: very low cost of land. Issue with living where I do: not much equity, so ( Read more... )

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated ( Read more... )

Yesterday we had a "flash freeze" weather warning. I've had snow, cold, and rainfall warnings before but nothing like that. I'd known the weather was going to drop so I hauled out the snowblower in the rain and got most of the heavy snow off the top of the driveway and loaded up the pigs with fresh straw. Sure enough, between 3pm and 9pm it dropped ( Read more... )

400 accessions and counting. Started Sweet Baby Jade tomato seeds. Should start my non-annuum peppers but I need to look up which ones need how many individuals to pollinate.

You know what's fun?

Thinking of crossing my matchbox chilis (OSSI pledged) that are growing on my windowsill and are basically my favourite hot pepper plant with C. flexuosum, which is hella cold-tolerant and is also 24n though of course it is an interspecific cross. I wonder if it will work?

I wonder how matchbox and doe hill would do, that should ( Read more... )

I'm part of a group on fb (Indri's vanilla bean group) that does co-op direct buys of vanilla beans in addition to its retail store -- it's extremely fair trade consumption and gets me a luxury good affordably. They're putting out a cookbook, so I'm doing some recipe testing for them.

On my list:
x The Coffee Cake (it's topped with toasted oats, ( Read more... )

It is making a significant difference to my life to use the lens "is this so hard for normal people?"

Most of my life has been the opposite: I connect on points of similarity, and I dig for them, and whether it's that something is hard or joyful or whatever that is how I align myself. Overlying my root-deep feeling that I'm the only one of my ( Read more... )