So, the box garden is surviving for the most part. Something ate the leaves off the gerbera, and now it seems to be dying. I’m assuming some kind of insect, as it began as holes in the leaves and then entire parts of the plant gone or dried up. It’s spread to the dahlia, which has a few chewed leaves but is mostly intact. Sadly it hasn’t flowered again after the first time. The petunias are staging a box takeover, which I expected once I relented to include them. Every bloom on the anemone plants is a different color and it’s become fun to guess what will pop up next. They don’t seem to be being eaten, but then they also don’t have the same kinds of leaves as the gerbera or the dahlia.

The mystery plant at the center of the box has proven to be a slip of the laurel bush next to the box. I may have to move it before it gets much larger, but right now it is green and beautiful. Speaking of the bushes, I discovered that a pinwheel (yes, a plastic child’s toy) that I had placed in the garden box after moving in last November is now stuck inside one of the andromeda bushes somehow. I can barely see it, even if I’m looking for it, and it’s completely invisible from within the yard. Considering I installed it intentionally as a yard sentry…it’s doing an even better job from its new location. Nicely played, pinwheel.

Home again. Sitting with budgets and schedules. Determined to find a way to fund my writing so that the writing can fund me. No idea where to start looking, less idea of whether it will be productive, but failure is not an option and this dissertation needs to be published sooner rather than later. Patreon is doing well. Growing it is probably my best option right now, as discussions about other projects/contracts aren’t moving very quickly. So many things to think and do and solve.

For the first time in 2019, the thermostat in my car said that it was 100 degrees F outside, for a minute this afternoon. It’s only May. This adds to the unease I already had after watching a winter that only felt like it happened in late March and early April, and then only for a handful of days.

Not very long ago, I sat with Chief Arvol Looking Horse in Minneapolis as he spoke with us about the teachings about the time when the earth becomes ill and the water threatens to leave us if we don’t help.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/feb/22/standing-rock-is-everywhere-one-year-later

I do not have his wisdom or his eloquence. Read his words for yourselves, and find those things you can do toward caring for this home we have and all the people, human and not human, who share it with us. For the earth, for the water, and for all the Peoples who live on the earth and in the water, we all must do what we can. The heat is only going up.

Today the doctor checked in with me on the blood tests I did last week. I am still getting used to the idea that tests aren’t necessarily dire, after more than a decade of tests explicitly around cancer (which I am mercifully now free of, after multiple attempted invasions). These were standard let’s-do-a-blood-panel type and generally nothing was surprising.

She doesn’t like my blood pressure. (Neither do I.) Says I need to stress less and is hopeful that now that dissertation is done I can come back in three months and test again. However privately amused I am at the idea that my stress will magically disappear in three months, I am listening, and taking her lecture to heart. No, I won’t be able to stop the stress entirely. Yes, I need to keep working on doing it anyway. Not going to get anything done at all if I am too sick or too dead to do it.