dirty mind
Can you believe it’s time to start tomato seeds again? I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow this time. One of my more impolite friends hints that it’s extremely tedious to read about kitty litter buckets and blossom drop. He needs to go forth and plant his own, I say. Meanwhile, I’m going to repeat the upside-down experiment, plus T has built a big wood frame for us to try gardening lasagna-style in the backyard. This is a layered compost method that makes up for lack of dirt underneath.
We sit almost directly on limestone. It gets so hot that turf roots just fry in our two inches of dirt even if I water them more than is reasonable for a responsible gardener, environmentalist, or tightwad. And we’re into a designated “extraordinary drought” now, so it’s going to be ever more difficult to justify. We’ve decided to slice the backyard in half…the part you can see from the back door will remain lawn, but the rest I have quit watering. We’re putting the first 12′ x 4′ garden bed out there, and will add a new one each season we stay here. By the time the wood frames rot out, we’ll have lots of great dirt to rejuvenate the yard.
I’ve got to deal with the mud if it ever rains again. I think we’ll start out with straw on the bare parts, and the whole place will look like a barnyard. So be it. The chickens are very talented with nitrogen excretion, and all those sweepings and rakings will soon have the compost cooking like a Texas dashboard in July.
covering our assets
The IRS is out to get us this year: “Us” being paid tax preparers, and “IRS” being IRS and also several consumer protection groups. It’s a good thing, really; they’re cracking down on fraud and the refund anticipation loan that I’ve never been easy with. It’s hard to chase down every individual who might be committing fraud; it’s much easier to target a storefront preparation business with a strangely huge number of clients who received their W-2’s awfully early in the season, or who have a different number of children every year, or who can’t seem to decide from year to year if they’re married or not. We can name the storefronts like that in our town.
The end result for the rest of us, honest and upstanding professional tax preparers that we are, is greatly increased liability…and therefore a new set of signatures we need from every client, a whole lot more CYA, a secret set of notes we can store with every return to document every possibly questionable decision we make. And relatively less-grudging support from the boss if we turn down a client.
During continuing education in December, somebody grumbled, “Oh great, now Katherine’s going to be even more of a bitch.” And yes. Yes, I am.
Most of our clients during the first big rush are painfully honest people hurrying in to claim their earned income credit and thankful for the help in maximizing their refund. We’re happy to see them and we’re happy to help them and their friends and their friends’ friends, even if we don’t have time to pee for a couple of days there.
The ones with that little hesitation, the glance sideways, the sudden change of story…it’s okay with me if they take their business to one of those other places. I’m sure they’ll all deserve what they end up with.
where the hell is Matt videogame edition
Okay, possibly you’re not as big a fan of Matt as I am. But this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all this young year.
clearly better
I’m retiring from Envirotex. Tired of the stuff. My last two cigar boxes were my best in every way except that the resin set up with a haze, leaving me thoroughly disgusted. I’m sure it’s mostly user error, but still. And then there’s the toxic fumes issue.
Anyway, the real reason I began to use Envirotex is because it looks like glass. So…why not use glass instead? Particularly with a kiln sitting out there in the garage. Glass has its own set of hazards but I think they’re well understood.
I ordered a few glass tiles from Etsy to try something like scrabble tile pendants, only better, and they are.
What I really love about this project is the way the voice of the little plain glass tile has changed. When I ordered it, it was just a nifty smooth piece of glass. Now it speaks of fire polish and fiber paper. Now it speaks of ramp time, heat soak and annealing.
Now it says: I can do that. And then why not a cigar box top? In about five years I may have something beautiful to show off.
In the meantime, there’s that bottle there. It was a test of a slumping program. Now it’s a spoon rest. If I never get good at anything else, I can produce spoon rests. Spoon rests for all!
Afghanistan accordion journey
If you’ve got three or four minutes and need a lighter heart, check this out: Afghanistan Accordion Journey. Don’t miss the end.
echoes of lost books
I found a book the other day. It’s one I read so long ago–let’s see, during that trip to Canada when I was what, nine? Too young for this book probably. Something about it stayed with me, though. Now and then it bubbled to the surface of memory, and I wondered if it was real. I didn’t remember thinking it was a particularly great read. I didn’t remember the names of the characters. I didn’t remember the location or whether there was any particular plot. I remembered it was wordy, Edwardian-style writing, and set in a jungle. I remembered a girl plummeting from a tree to her death in a fire…a great tragedy, but always suffused in green and gold light. And birdsong. And surprisingly, now that I’ve found it as an adult, that’s still the way I’ll remember it.
Of course you can find almost anything on Google, and somewhat hilariously, I found that Rima the Jungle Girl gained brief fame in a DC comic book series of the mid 70s…but that’s got nothing to do with me or my experience of Green Mansions.
I still don’t think it’s a great read. But there’s that green and gold thing, and far-off birdsong, behind a door somewhere in my memory–or I think it more likely a window, because now and then it’s open and I catch the echo of a few hours I spent one summer, curled up in a rocking chair somewhere along the Canadian border, rain falling outside, jungle blooming in my mind.
leaving tracks
I started a book list for the year, because it will make me happy later to look back and see where I’ve been.
