racheldirollzack.com

Not my strong suit.

Which makes me occasionally question this whole garden thing.

Moderation.

Also not my strong suit.

Which means I have planted 72 tomato seedlings.

Yes.

Seventy-two.

That’s 12 each of 6 varieties of tomato.

I have no idea where I’m going to put them since last year’s garden was way over-crowded with just 16 plants, 3 of which were mercilessly ripped from the ground halfway through the season (meaning: before they reached 12 feet tall).

So.

I am going to come up with some plans for raised beds, which will halve the amount of ground-hacking I need to do and will also solve the ‘this ain’t dirt, it’s clay’ issue that I have out back. Also the erosion issue that arose after last year’s no-plan garden.

Hope you all like homemade salsa because that’s what everyone is getting for Xmas this year.

August is going to be a fun one, no?

Sooooooooo….. that catastrophic data loss I had last week? Where my user profile appeared to be deleted and I proceeded to LOSE MY FREAKING MIND because I thought I’d lost all my music and pictures?

Apparently it didn’t actually happen.

After five full days of freaking right out and then restoring the data (twice!) and MANUALLY deleting 18,000 song files that were copied somehow by the restore, I finally felt confident enough to take the computer out of backup mode and re-start it.

So I held my breath, crossed my fingers, and hit ‘restart.’

Since I am superstitious and computer fuck-ups tend to make me a wee bit homicidal, I didn’t sit around to watch the beeping and booping and whirring and whatnot of the restart. I went into another room altogether to wait a few minutes. I might have prayed a little bit. Maybe.

I gathered up whatever remained of my wits and tiptoed cautiously back to the table.

And.

It was all back. ALL OF IT. My old desktop photo, all the crap bookmarks/shortcuts on the desktop… all of it. As if nothing had ever happened.

I am so confused. Grateful, sure. But confused as all get-out because WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED in the first place? I went through five full days of losing my shit for NO GOOD REASON? I like to at least have a reason when I lose my mind, you know?

SO confused. And now I’m going to constantly be worried that this will happen again. I know it’s not a tragedy, since I do have backup, but I don’t need this kind of anxiety! I create enough on my own, dammit!

I am getting better about eating things during the seasons in which they grow.

However, this generally means no fresh tomatoes in February. But I’m getting smarter - I’m looking at where things at the grocery store are coming from and I’m trying to buy fruits and veggies from New Jersey or as close as possible whenever I can. The grocery store does not make this easy, mind you, since they are fairly lax about labelling the veggies with their planet of origin.

Anyway, I was in the store today picking up last-minute stuff for the salad that goes with tonight’s dinner (cucmbers, oops; bagged salad, double oops; but I said I was trying) and there were the tomatoes, looking kind of okay.

Now, the myth of the Jersey tomato is a popular one. One that I didn’t believe at first because I’m from OHIO, for heaven’s sake. We have farms everywhere out there! Surely the tomatoes are better? Fewer people, less pollution?

Apparently not. The Jersey tomato is an amazing thing. I have heard of people who have saved seeds from their gardens in New Jersey, thinking that they could just grow them anywhere with the same result. Not so. There is something about New Jersey that makes tomatoes happy. In my own .18 acre of New Jersey, there is something that makes tomatoes VERY happy.

Last year, in my kamikaze garden, I put in 16 tomato plants. 14 of the plants actually survived the summer, and about 9 of them produced. And boy, did they produce. We got to the point where we were just chucking tomatoes directly into the compost because we couldn’t eat them anymore. This year we will have no such problems because we are gonna CAN them suckers.

My tomatoes? OMG. Oh. Em. Gee. So amazingly good. Between the clay-tastic soil, the fallout from the diesel exhaust from the trainyard a couple blocks away, and whatever the hell Johnson & Johnson is polluting the place with (they have a research & development facility about a quarter-mile from The Butterfly Ranch), my tomatoes were… indescribable. Just… whoa.

The trouble is, they don’t last. We got a few good ones at the end of July, then spent all of August and September eating tomatoes in and on every meal, including breakfast. Sure, we got sick of them, but come January, the body just cries out for some fresh tomato goodness. Here’s where the difficulty arises. Tomatoes like the sun. I have heard of the sun, but haven’t seen it lately. So I’m pretty sure there aren’t a whole lot of tomatoes ripening in the backyards of my state. Still, there they were today, on the shelf, looking all red and tomato-y. I couldn’t help it, and I bought some.

Because I knew it was a splurge, I didn’t buy those sickly pinkish styrofoam balls from Chile. Ohhh no. I don’t want to eat a tomato that is nearly as old as Jillian is because I know it will be a mealy, tasteless disappointment. I plumped for the Campari tomatoes, since they almost never disappoint. Looking at the package, I saw that they are grown hydroponically. I don’t know anything about that except that it’s a good way to grow pot. *Note to self, research just what the hell hydroponic means, just in case it involves ground-up kittens or something.

Even better? These are hydroponically grown in NEW JERSEY. Yep, that’s right. About 50 miles away, in fact. So, while they aren’t the poop-your-pants goodness of my mid-summer tomato bounty, in February? They’ll do.

This is only a test, I hope.

I woke up this morning and opened up the computer to find that it had somehow killed everything. EVERYTHING. Music? Gone. Photos? Gone. Everything, everything, everything, gone, gone, gone.

Any programs I’d installed were intact, which was weird, but any data/settings? GONE.

How does this happen? Nobody seems to know. I think Bill Gates got mad at me the other day for telling Windows Vista to shut up. I’m SORRY, okay?

This has created a weird space in my head. This weird space is occupied by the thought that I am incredibly thankful for Howard Stern. Why? Well.

Freddie enjoys the comedy stylings of Howard Stern. I don’t really understand this, since I find him boring and repetitive (not to mention puerile and lowest-common-denominator). So Freddie listens to Howard on the radio. And one of the companies that advertises on Howard’s radio show is for a PC backup service, of which we are customers.

So, when the thing is finished restoring everything I had lost this morning, we’ll see if we’re getting our money’s worth (we’re at 68% restored at the moment). And then I will not say anything derogatory about Howard Stern or his fans for at least a week.

The real test today is to see how well I keep it together. I have been hanging on to my sanity by a very fine thread for quite some time now, since things in my house insist upon requiring repair, which costs me money. It would be one thing if everything was broken at once, but it’s not like that. Something breaks, I get it fixed (because of course it’s a fix that is outside even my crafty MacGuyver skills), I pay for it, and then something else goes. This has been going on since October and I am pretty sure I’m close to my limit of being able to cope without being medicated.

This constant feeling of “NOW WHAT” is going to be the death of me. I’m trying to be all Zen or whatever happy-clappy coping bullshit, but it’s difficult. VERY difficult. I just keep breathing, keep moving, keep rolling. Four years ago, when I was Professionally Crazy, this would have been the end of me. But I know I’ll get through it if I just keep moving.

Drugs would be more efficient, of course, but I am becoming increasingly anti-pharmie in my old age. I don’t want to be That Girl who takes pills for everything because she can’t cope, can’t sleep, can’t get out of bed. I can do all of those things.

My internet service is not the greatest. It comes and goes, usually without reason or pattern. This is not a good thing.

It went out again today. Told me there was a problem with the DNS, and… the error message directed me to a website for more info. When I couldn’t access the internet. Well played, Microsoft Vista. Well played, indeed.

Shut UP, Microsoft Vista.

So… the internet was out and so was the phone (VoIP), which meant I had to not only locate, but use my cell phone. This is a challenge in many ways: once the phone is located, I have to hope it’s charged. Otherwise, I am tethered to the nearest plug while it charges. The Deafness factor does not help this, nor does the Toddler Factor.

Phone was found, was medium-charged, and because I’m stupid, I called the cable company and opted to allow it to walk me through the troubleshooting steps with the automated system. DON’T EVER TRY THIS if you cannot handle stupidity.

Eventually, I gave up trying to make the thing understand me when I said “continue” and I got a human on the phone. Who could not hear me because the phone was breaking up. I suppose this is what one can expect when one has a $7 cell phone.

I gave up. Had some lunch. Decided to give it another shot and here we are. But for how long?

As much as I love and adore my computer and my Imaginary Internet Friends who live inside it, I could probably be perfectly happy living without this shiny machine. But I don’t want to find out for sure.

I’m getting ready to plan my assault on Mother Nature. I have such a huge list of things I want to grow (or try to grow, as the case may be) and I’m already fully aware that my ambitions far outstrip my actual skills.

The first thing that needs to be done is the garden expansion. There are probably better/easier ways to do it, but they require tools that I do not have. So it will be me, a rake, and a hoe out in the backyard for a couple of backbreaking days. It will be good for me, ultimately. Then I’ll have to rearrange the area along the back fence, because we had some pretty major erosion there due to my lack of planning last year. So that will need to be fixed somehow.

Then I have to decide what will go where, and when. I have no idea when to plant most things. I suppose I could get a book or find a website or something (I have quite a few sites bookmarked) but that would make sense! Why not re-invent the wheel? There is so much I don’t know. I don’t know when I should put lettuce in, and then what does it look like when it bolts? No idea. I know when to put in tomatoes and peppers, but what about broccoli? Can I put garlic in now or do I have to wait and put that in during the fall? No idea. Do I want to start asparagus from seed and wait at least three years before I can harvest? Or do I want to buy a set of crowns and put them in and hope to harvest next spring?

There is so much to do.

This ‘let’s all not be a rageaholic’ thing does not make for good blog posts. There are a few things that I could go off and rant about, but what’s the point? Those things are not going to change, so I’m not about to waste my time and energy on them.

Some things just don’t matter.

In other news, my mom broke her leg last week. In true Diroll fashion, my dad sent my brother and me an email TWO DAYS LATER. Like, thanks, Dad. [eyeroll] The email was worded in such a way that we couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. We didn’t know if she was still in the hospital or what, so we had to call and figure it out. It turns out she’s as fine as someone with a broken leg can be, but she had to cancel her annual trip to Daytona this year. It took at least 4 people to talk her out of it, though. The woman is demented.

In the next couple of months, Jillian and I will probably head out there for a couple of days. If I can convince Freddie to take some time off work, he’ll come too. Maybe I’ll put together some kind of gathering with my high-school peeps (thanks to the magic of Facebook, we are all finding each other again) and introduce him. We’ll have to see - the weather between here and there has been so uniformly awful that I don’t know how wise it would be to drive across Pennsylvania right now.