Winter’s last (I hope!) snow tantrum and I’m never wrong but I might have been not entirely correct this one time
Ah, it seems like I just wrote the last Saturday blog…
The snow fell, about 5-6” of it at my house, and while it did cover everything, it seems the irises are now emerging from it not that much worse off than before it hit.
I expect this is just about it for snow. We might yet get the odd flake here and there, but there’s no major snow on the 14 day forecast and after that… well, I have on occasion seen an inch or two as late as mid-April when I lived in Vancouver but those are freak years. We’ll soon be just 6 weeks out from average last frost date, which is to say we’ll be in spring for sure and this weekend was the final tantrum of winter.
In related news, I guess I’d best start clearing off some space on the laundry room counter for some seed trays. And I should see what needs to be started when.
I usually plant things out in the (veggie) garden on May 1, so I’ll still be good for the “6-8 weeks before last frost” stuff, though the sweet peas should perhaps be thrown out on the ground this week, snow and ice not withstanding.
One thing I will not bother starting indoors this time is sunflowers. Last year I started two dozen “Russian Mammoth” sunflowers, which were supposed to grow to as high as 10′ tall.
Now, after planting the seedlings out into the landscape around the edges of my front yard, I did indeed have 10′ tall sunflowers, but here’s the thing: not a damn one of them were the “Russian Mammoths” I planted, which mostly topped out around 4′ tall and with seedheads way smaller than the promised 12″ across.
Nope, the tall sunflowers I got last summer were all ones the damn birds planted throughout my yard as they carelessly dropped the seeds they were eating off of the previous year’s mix of “Taiyo” and “Lemon Queen” sunflowers, which themselves had not been overly huge but their spawns ranged from 7 to, yes, 10′ tall.
I decided to leave the seedlings as I spotted them to see what came up, and was quite pleased with them.
Weirdly enough those are the only two photos of the sunflowers I could find, but the yard was full of them and I loved looking at them.
(I dunno… 2020 wasn’t exactly a cheerful year and while I took a decent amount of flower photos, I didn’t take anywhere near as many as I did the year before.)
I left all the sunflowers up throughout the winter, only yanking their withered husks a couple weeks ago, long past when all the seeds had either been eaten or scattered, so here’s hoping for a repeat performance this summer.
In other news, the university now has all my transcripts and I hope I hear within a week whether I’ve been accepted or not, considering I’m seeing the kiddies posting about their acceptances already on the subreddit.
Granted I think that’s high school kiddies and self-reporting grades, but still.
And hey, a lot can happen between now and September. I do hope things remain wholly online as they have been this year, because then I may well bump up my plans to escape Canada since one could just as easily be watching Zoom classes from a charming courtyard in, say, Guadalajara as from my dining room in the Cowichan Valley.
Just sayin’…
I think the summer schedule comes out next week, and by checking that I’ll be able to make a better educated guess as to what things will look like in the fall. I did hear from an undisclosed source that a very large percentage of the students in my program prefer the online version and at least half the faculty do as well, so maybe I’ll get lucky and we’ll all be able to continue going to class in our pajamas, thereby allowing me to get out of Dodge and attend class in flip flops and my bathing suit instead.
(Tough shit if anyone else doesn’t like the view, this is why Post-Its were invented.)
I’ll spare the discussions of what I’ve been writing this week, because… well, until it’s done and published or posted or whatever, y’all can’t see it so it’s kinda the blog version of when your grandma and your uncle argue in front of you about what kind of car your third cousin who you never met drove in 1952 and what color was it? Y’know, shitty content that makes you bored and peevish.
Suffice to say that after doing some writing exercises on what may end up being a novel, I started thinking my main character is basically the me I wish I was when I was 19, and I did some Googling to see if that’s a typical thing and I found the following quote from Oscar Wilde:
“In every first novel, the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.”
So… I guess it’s not just me. I guess that’s something that can be fixed later on.
Or I can put it out under a pen name so it’s less obvious.
What else… I generally never admit to having been wrong, but hypothetically speaking I may well have been not entirely correct about that U2 album Songs of Innocence, which I bitched about back in the day when it wouldn’t get the Hell out of my iTunes and which I may have hypothetically ordered on CD a couple weeks ago because I did actually manage to manke it go away back in the day and I may have since learned/decided that actually I do like some of their music and it is no longer a free download on iTunes plus I’m old school and prefer hard copies of everything. Hypothetically speaking, I may well have been listening to Songs of Innocence in my car while driving around yesterday and in theory I may well have decided I don’t hate any of the songs on it and some of them I may well actually quite like.
None of which is the same thing as admitting to having been wrong.
Because I’m never wrong.
Obviously.
