Life ongoes
Feb. 28th, 2019 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeFor the last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of writing, back and forth between home and one of the university library computers. I finished both the stories I meant to, and submitted them to Elizabeth and leaflemming's anthology. (For the first half of the month I thought the deadline for the anthology was November. No, it was in fact today. Very lucky I'd imposed that deadline on myself anyway.)
Also gardening at Raewyn's. This sometimes means gardening, and sometimes, these weeks, it means mixing and pouring concrete into new outdoor steps and a retaining wall under the house -- which makes a change from several years of sporadically shattering bits of old steps and old retaining walls. A process of renovation slowly coming done. The garden out back, in which I've been listening to Shakespeare's Henriad, (if whatever I'm doing isn't rustling too loudly -- old earbuds, many dukes to keep track of), is actually two adjacent gardens, both sizeable. Raewyn's daughter owns the property next to hers, and Raewyn takes care of both, as well as an indefinite extent of the council bush on the hill behind them. Regenerating mounds of tradescantia to be raked ineffectually back from the small, striving kawakawa seedlings, always the first things to manage to sprout. Cabbage tree fronds to be tied in bundles and used for mulch. Six singing cicadas to a cabbage tree, this season. The bare bank below and beside the main cabbage tree patch to be cleared of prolific deadly nightshade.
Raewyn is a potter. She has an exhibit on at the moment, if any Auckland-area people are interested:
http://www.objectspace.org.nz/exhibitions/i-too-am-in-paradise-ii/
I helped make some of the stepped bases the urns sit on, digging their clay out of the bank by the garden shed, scraping out flax fibres to strengthen it using the edge of a mussel shell (from leaves cut by the other side of the garden shed), pressing it layer by layer into moulds. Definitely my favourite of the things I've done at this job so far. The pleasure of honing a repetitive process, the feel of the clay, making something. And, urns and bases being unfired, they've been sitting by the back door for the past year, collapsing slowly while being filmed time-lapse, which is what's in the gallery now. (All frames containing gardeners or chickens edited out).
My walk home from gardening takes me past a long bank of roadside blackberries, unsprayed and berrying well. I've seen two people out with buckets, and the fact that I walk back from gardening in heavy boots and jeans means I can jump the fence beside Northland Road and wade a little way into the deeper tangle at the top of the big retaining wall, where other passers-by tend not to have got to the ripest ones.
What else have I been doing? Watching Russian Doll (thank youskygiants). Cooking out of a vegetarian Indian cookbook, from which I plan two meals every time I go past the Indian supermarket in Newtown -- that's working quite well. Still at the stage where everything takes twice as long as I expect and then the spinach has vanished, but cooking with fresh-ground spices is definitely better. Meals wind up complicated and improvable instead of bland. And a blessing on flatmate Lucy's herb planters, not that they currently seem to need one.
The ongoing family/friends Risk Legacy game remains in a state of 'theoretically happening, actually one of the friends has band practice', but the weekly family dinner remains pleasantly weekly, with some Pandemic Cthulhu thrown in now and then. Next week the semester starts, which means choir starts and so does Ecology, and I've joined the Wellington Film Society, whose screenings start next week too, and there's a brief intense whack of casual work for Charlotte's company doing phone interviews... And there is the book -- the one with mirrors, called, perhaps, Marram -- somewhat begun.
leaflemming's anthology. (For the first half of the month I thought the deadline for the anthology was November. No, it was in fact today. Very lucky I'd imposed that deadline on myself anyway.)Also gardening at Raewyn's. This sometimes means gardening, and sometimes, these weeks, it means mixing and pouring concrete into new outdoor steps and a retaining wall under the house -- which makes a change from several years of sporadically shattering bits of old steps and old retaining walls. A process of renovation slowly coming done. The garden out back, in which I've been listening to Shakespeare's Henriad, (if whatever I'm doing isn't rustling too loudly -- old earbuds, many dukes to keep track of), is actually two adjacent gardens, both sizeable. Raewyn's daughter owns the property next to hers, and Raewyn takes care of both, as well as an indefinite extent of the council bush on the hill behind them. Regenerating mounds of tradescantia to be raked ineffectually back from the small, striving kawakawa seedlings, always the first things to manage to sprout. Cabbage tree fronds to be tied in bundles and used for mulch. Six singing cicadas to a cabbage tree, this season. The bare bank below and beside the main cabbage tree patch to be cleared of prolific deadly nightshade.
Raewyn is a potter. She has an exhibit on at the moment, if any Auckland-area people are interested:
http://www.objectspace.org.nz/exhibitions/i-too-am-in-paradise-ii/
I helped make some of the stepped bases the urns sit on, digging their clay out of the bank by the garden shed, scraping out flax fibres to strengthen it using the edge of a mussel shell (from leaves cut by the other side of the garden shed), pressing it layer by layer into moulds. Definitely my favourite of the things I've done at this job so far. The pleasure of honing a repetitive process, the feel of the clay, making something. And, urns and bases being unfired, they've been sitting by the back door for the past year, collapsing slowly while being filmed time-lapse, which is what's in the gallery now. (All frames containing gardeners or chickens edited out).
My walk home from gardening takes me past a long bank of roadside blackberries, unsprayed and berrying well. I've seen two people out with buckets, and the fact that I walk back from gardening in heavy boots and jeans means I can jump the fence beside Northland Road and wade a little way into the deeper tangle at the top of the big retaining wall, where other passers-by tend not to have got to the ripest ones.
What else have I been doing? Watching Russian Doll (thank you
skygiants). Cooking out of a vegetarian Indian cookbook, from which I plan two meals every time I go past the Indian supermarket in Newtown -- that's working quite well. Still at the stage where everything takes twice as long as I expect and then the spinach has vanished, but cooking with fresh-ground spices is definitely better. Meals wind up complicated and improvable instead of bland. And a blessing on flatmate Lucy's herb planters, not that they currently seem to need one. The ongoing family/friends Risk Legacy game remains in a state of 'theoretically happening, actually one of the friends has band practice', but the weekly family dinner remains pleasantly weekly, with some Pandemic Cthulhu thrown in now and then. Next week the semester starts, which means choir starts and so does Ecology, and I've joined the Wellington Film Society, whose screenings start next week too, and there's a brief intense whack of casual work for Charlotte's company doing phone interviews... And there is the book -- the one with mirrors, called, perhaps, Marram -- somewhat begun.
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Date: 2019-02-28 02:51 pm (UTC)