Yay! Spring! Finally!
So, as the title says, no matter what the calendar says, it isn’t really spring until we pass the last average frost date.
Which is April 10th here, and the 14 day forecast shows no sign of any later surprise frosts.
In fact, I’ve been able to forego my space heater (one of those oil radiator types) that I’ve had to use every evening to make sure my bedroom was over 68ºF by the time I go to bed. I’m not putting it away in the storage room yet since next week will be cooler and I might possibly need it on the lowest setting to take the edge off for a few nights, but otherwise, we’re pretty much into spring or even near-summer.
I even had to do the direction reversal thing on my upstairs hall ceiling fan and start leaving the upstairs windows open all day when I’m home.
Ah… that’s more like it…
Of course, in another month or so we’ll get to the point where it’s 86ºF in my bedroom or worse for a few months, but I’ll complain about that when we get there. For now, it’s perfect for a few weeks.
Out in the garden, I finally cleaned up the veggie beds and started planting. 120-ish onion and shallot sets, which I really should have planted in early March, but whatever… last year I didn’t plant them til mid-May because it took that long to get the raised beds built and filled, and I still had those ready to harvest in the fall.
I will start some things from seed, especially corn and peas and radishes, but I got lazy and simply picked up starts for my tomatos, slicer cukes, herbs, and a couple 6-packs of lettuce to kickstart things (again, I should have planted those in March from seed, whatever…).
So that’s a big chore started and almost finished (what I’m planting from seeds will be done in succession planting a bit at a time every couple weeks through June).
I’m hoping this year I get a lot of corn; last year was a bust and the year before I had only enough for one dinner with my dad and my aunt and uncle. Of course, last year I stupidly put pumpkins in the same bed and those grew massive and sucked all the water and nutrients out, and the year before I didn’t plant in efficient blocks.
In other garden news, the tulips are starting to open and I saw my first of the ‘Golden Lizard’ tulips open up front.
Still got a lot that are still budded up and waiting, though.
Only one of the ‘Pink Parasol’ daffodils returned from, and I have yet to see a single of the 30+ ‘Delnashaugh’ daffodils, which were plentiful last year and should have shown themselves already.
Guess I’ll replace them with ‘Replete’ daffs this fall since those are doing very well indeed, as I think I’ve shown in previous weeks.
What else… for now, at least, I’ve decided to narrow my focus to comedy writing. So I’ll be setting aside other book projects for the time being… well, I might well still do the music writings zine, because I plan to inject a bunch of comedy into it, and because I don’t plan to spend a huge amount of time on it. It’ll get done when it gets done.
I did debate rushing a poetry and lyrics anthology out of all the stuff I did under the maQLu project, but holy shit it’s impossible to figure out how to do a self-published physical book that’s both affordable for the buyers (like, not $35 or worse) and at least somewhat profitable (like, make a couple bucks per copy sold, not anything huge) and also make it look awesome with graphics as well as text.
Maybe I’m getting bogged down in the Hell that is Lulu.com and online tutorials (and Lulu’s InDesign templates suck, BTW, almost as bad as their YouTube tutorials) but it seems that it would make more sense to just get an offset printing run, and it would probably still be obscenely expensive plus I’d have to have a pallet of them somewhere in my house.
Yeah, naw…
This will also be an issue with what I was talking about on this week’s Under My Skin about doing Zamo books, both an anthology of all the original comics but also doing illustrated collections of the podcast scripts… at least those are meant to be black and white with linework, so that kind of printing is much cheaper than photos and art reproductions.
Whatever, deal with it later. I have a comedic novel underway and at least that one is easy to set up with Amazon’s own print on demand so you don’t get screwed twice on the royalties if any sell.
And of course I have some sitcom pilot ideas and feature-length spec scripts that I’m working on as well. Figuring out the budget of how to produce those into a final project wouldn’t be my problem, lol.
Anyway, I actually sat down and made a list of projects and priorities and rejigged my schedule to accommodate them. Now I just have to stick to it.
Lastly, here’s a couple more recent digital collages I’ve made:
