Ambergris

Some gorgeous little three-inch-tall tomatoes and all will stay for the next tenant in this garden space. 

In seventeen days, my plants, including my "backup" seedling tomatoes (none of which is a happy, sturdy three-incher), will go to the new place.  Seven days later, I will move to the new place and start breaking soil.  Obviously, I'm anxious about that transit and the week of neglect following, but that's just how it is.  I do have plenty of tomato seeds in case they all die.

Right now, I have three big sunflowers in full bloom, from which I should be able to take plenty of seeds over the next two weeks.  While I'm going to a slightly higher elevation, I'm hoping they will still recognize the biome and act like they're locally adapted.  Similarly, I have carnations, French marigolds, and "female" plantains (with enormous ruffly leaves) all seeding out now or getting ready to seed out after growing and blooming in this yard.

The pots that are moving include at least one kumquat (it's fruited, and I recognize the cultivar), and several not-yet-ripe citrus fruit that have been described as a Meyer lemon, a sweet lime, some sour ones, a couple of mandarins, a willow-leafed one I think I recognize as a "juicing" orange, which I got primarily for its amazing heavy blooms, and what I hope is a makrut cooking lime used in Thai cooking, as well as a "Cuban oregano" called simply "oregano" here, with big thick fuzzy leaves that are used for muscle pain etc., lots of parsley, some garlics and onions, red geraniums, scented geraniums with various properties, rosemary, nasturtiums, a window-cup sweet potato with a few good slips starting out of it, what I recognize as starts of oca (and what people here call something else that I need to get written down, because my ears are refusing to register the sounds properly), a bay leaf tree, three avocado trees, a cattleya guava, a supposedly dwarf mango, something with Lemon Pledge scented leaves that I still can't get information about, and so on. 

In addition, I've been going around taking cuttings to propagate, and there's a lot I can snip from.  If one in ten of them strikes root and leaf, I will need a LOT of space.

Hawthorn is native to Virginia and has thorns as well as vitamin-rich berries that make good jelly.  Some kinds make good thorny hedges you can use to protect non-thorny plants.

Some roses, like rugosas, grow bigger and fruitier hips.  Frau Dagmar Hartoop sticks in my mind.  

If you can handle thorns, I recommend thorny plants.

I would suggest fruit that was colored green when ripe.  When we had our fruit being stolen, only the green-colored plums seemed to be safe.

Evacuated.  Wow.  Then went shopping.  Am now back home.

https://earthquaketrack.com/p/ecuador/recent  says there have been 0 earthquakes in the past 24 hours, so either they haven't listed them yet (why wouldn't they?) or it was just the skin of our mountain slipping.  I don't add in "dreaming" because my cat was sitting up and upset both times.  Could have dreamed that too, but it seems really unlikely.

Earthquakes woke me up twice last night.  Neither shows up on earthquaketrack.com yet.  One at I think 2:20 and one, which lasted a good twenty seconds after I woke up, an hour later.  I put money, ID, bank card, and phone in my pocket and put on my shoes, and somehow had trouble going back to sleep after.

So I don't know what I'm up to today, but I hope it's not challenging.

Thin beach towel or long bathrobe laid down over the nasty carpet.  It washes and dries with the normal laundry.  Regardless, doing a quarter of the exercises is better than doing none of them.  It's not an all-or-none set.

I have warm memories of visiting The City of Elizabeth City, although the name seems silly.

Hate to say it, but he was likely smoking something more expensive than Marlboros, and didn't want you to smell it.

Picked up a roast chicken with sides (soup, rice, fried potatoes) which counts as fast food here and brought it home to eat.  Oh, so good.  Cut up the leftovers and froze them.  Also picked up some not-quite-ripe plantains and creole avocados (i.e. seedling, not Haas) to ripen over the course of the week.  The pottery lady from Cera was at the market selling pots, but I don't want to buy large breakable objects mere weeks before moving.

Made an agreement with a guy in a truck to move my potted plants on May 22 and my other things on May 29.  This leaves plenty of time to clean up.  I hope this is what got agreed to.

Planted sunflowers and marigolds together as a backdrop to the red, gold, and red-gold roses.  Found that a few sunflowers from a prior panting are ankle-high, which is great news.

Gritted my teeth a lot, as my Siamese cat-in-heat has found her voice.

Laundry is on the line.  Roses are planted.  Bathroom is bleached.  Floor is swept (kitchen twice).  Bed is changed and made.  Can you tell the housekeeper is here?

While she did all that, I worked on Spanish lessons and salted down some limes, mixing sweet limes from the tree with key lime type limes from the market and mixing the pink Himalayan salt with sea salt.  

We're about to head to the feed store in the housekeeper's kinda scary car to lay in big bags of cuy pellets, corn for both chickens and cuy, and mash for the chickens.  

3 minutes ago, euphrasyne said:

I'm listening to audible audiobooks brain candy space alien romance NSFW.   Downtime of mind and body.  Let me just say Tor Thom is the best narrator ever.  

I used to edit those.  Such fun.

I did move the food to the other side of the gate, and that did appear to take care of the problem.  

You can get cheaper cigarettes than Marlboro.  We had couch-dwellers who asked for $7 packs of cigarettes but didn't throw out the occasional $4.50 packs I handed over.  

11 hours ago, Jeepers said:

My sciatic nerve is really inflamed. 

An abandoned teenaged cat was sort of adopted by neighbors on the other side of the hill, who are currently out of the country.  So the cat is now ranging around looking for food and comfort.  My cats don't want him here, and I am having to hear all about it.  The furor has been going on for a good half hour now.  I put down food my cats had refused to eat for two days.  They might be refusing to eat it, but they are now refusing to let him eat it on their turf. 

I don't really know where their turf ends.

I would suggest adding the cost of the closet door to his rent, but I know from experience this would likely lead to a barrage of other damage.

The onions I put in the dehydrator today are already dry, but still have more bite in them than I like.  I plan to leave them in overnight to mellow and start the toasting process, then maybe crush and finish toasting in a dry frying pan.  This oven is so unpredictable I mainly use it as storage space.

My payment should be deposited on Sunday, the end of the month, but as the end of the month is on the weekend, I just now checked and found out it was deposited today.  Yay.  This is especially handy because May 1 is a state holiday here, and the ATMs might run out of money by Sunday.

Today was the last day of exercise sessions with the super-encouraging and astonishingly knowledgeable D.  Am I ever sore--Monday, Wednesday, and again today were each a step up in intensity.  Today I had to stop a couple of times because I was getting splotches in my vision.  I might take another hot shower right before bed to loosen my muscles. 

Monday we start with R, and today I downloaded Youtube videos to test out as lighter Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday workouts, which I can build on once I move.

Reconfigure a leg-hold trap or something similar to, when it triggered, open instead of closing, knocking a large portion of snow off to the side of one step, maybe while breaking ice?  Then only sweep up what's left while accomplice resets trap for next step down?  Or would that be too dangerous?

I thought of pouring boiling water, but that would end up being ice, right?

There were five in this new litter, actually.  I counted wrong the first day (or one was hiding) when I said three living.  There was also one I found dead although fully formed and perfect.  It looked like his mother didn't know where to stop when cleaning his cord, although she clearly figured it out after this one, poor thing.

I consider all these potential meat.  The ones that are full grown are smaller than the great majority of the cuy I see being grilled, so I had planned to breed for size.

Yesterday's babies with mama.

Size comparison, left to right:  one week old, Papa, mother of week-old babies, yesterday baby, butt of mama of yesterday baby.

The speed of dehydrating things here (when it isn't raining) keeps shocking me.  I started slicing these four tray-fulls of mushrooms right before twilight, and I had them all pulled off the tray and into the curing bowl before full daylight.  They would still be chugging along all day today in Florida.  I'll get the onions sliced and all in a bit.  I want the machine to cool down and rest first, as I don't own it.  

I already had a small amount of dried mushrooms to use as dried mushrooms.  I want to powder these new mushrooms, once they cure, and mix with salt (mostly), red pepper, brown pepper, black pepper, and toasted onion powder for an "umami blast" similar to Nom Nom Paleo's mushroom powder. 

I want to toast these onions, once they dry, and then grind a little for the mushroom powder.  I already have a baggie of dried onions (not toasted) and a pretty fresh little jar of onion powder, but you can never have too much onion in the pantry.

This morning I tried another start on black garlic.

Did I mention I finally got two bottles of vinegar?  One is pear/ginger and one ended up being based on random bits of fruit and a couple ounces of tangerine wine.  

Wouldn't it be nice if a different angle of broom head or bent handle would take care of that?  Like a scythe handle maybe?

Coincidentally, I had a horrible dream...I will spare you the details, on second thought.

Ironing is a health thing.  You have to iron the seams of clothing to kill lice, and while you're there, you might as well iron the flat both to finish the job and to show you did the work.

I watch the Canadian guy once in a while too.  Good luck on the solar well power system.  We kept making appointments for the solar people, but if it wasn't a $30k job on the whole house, they didn't want to make time for us.  The house in question was a twenty-year-old double wide, so ...right.  Also, the well is a magnet for lightning, so you need humongous lightning rods and overload disconnectors (I forget the names of those) for the system.

$10K windfall?  I'd probably split it between my sons so they could each get a whole-house generator ($3500) and a major house or car repair of their choice each.

$10k windfall for me specifically?  That's about what it would cost to fly roundtrip back to the States to do some new packing and ship a container here with some of the "stuff" I abandoned, including books and canning jars (empty--can't bring home-canned food here) and other things neither of the boys would likely ever use or eat on their own.

Mmm... cranberry scones...