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April 22, 2007
Vacation: A week in neutral
I'm on vacation, but it won't feel real till tomorrow.
Friday was a deadline scramble all day. It was my brother's birthday, and I baked him a cake before work. My plan to frost it and be done tanked when I saw I didn't have three cups of confectioners sugar. After a workday filled with weekend site chores, vacation handoffs and a few advance projects, I bought the sugar, made the frosting, changed clothes and raced downtown with the rest of the family to meet the birthday boy at Pot au Feu, only a little late.
He ordered a bottle of red zinfandel -- a new taste for me, dry and light -- and the vacation began. Later, at my house, the cake happened:

Yesterday, I bought pansies in bloom for the window boxes on the street side of the house, read a mystery novel and played Jardinains 2.
Today, I'll plant, finally -- lettuce and spinach seeds and broccoli seedlings in the raised bed outdoors, peas along the fence, shallots around the roses. (My master gardener friend says her mother promises the late cold won't matter, that everything will catch up by June.)

We planted garlic in that bed in the fall, sets a colleague gave us. They came up immediately, and grew till January, about four inches. The late arrival of winter after that browned the tips and stopped the growth, but they're going again now, alongside daffodils ready to pop and hyacinths whose flower buds are just showing. Giant alliums (allii?) are pushing up leaves that looked, last week, like shiny, forest-green pineapple tops. Today, after a few warm days, they're huge.
Indoors, seeds of tender annuals such as tomatoes, peppers and basil will go in peat pots in trays on the warm top of the fridge.
After that, I see unstructured time. The weather looks promising -- balmy now, a bookworm's rain after that.

Posted by Sheila Lennon
at 9:15 AM | Permalink