Buried Under Mt. Roid

Last time I took 150 mgs of prednisone like this, I obliterated all inflammation in the known universe. It was kind of great. Especially as I still had that cyst compressing my spinal cord. I got a lot of relief for like a week.

This time...I feel absolutely awful and high as fuck. (I don't know that I'm high high, but I don't know how else to describe it.)

And the contrast seems to have irritated the liver. I'm having a lot of trouble eating today.

So I'm nauseated, exhausted, my brain is broken, I have a headache, diarrhea, and my liver hurts.

Going straight into colonoscopy prep is going to be amazing, I'm sure. Not.

OMG I think it wasn't so smart doing these back to back. What was I thinking???

And the teen's homeschool co-op is full of nasty homophobes. I'm so disappointed. We are a love is love is love family. We have gay relatives and friends we love and the teen is not cool with hearing all the so called jokes and seeing so many kids thinking it's hilarious to be someone who defines themselves by what they hate.

I need to write a polite FYI and WTF to the director. But my brain is currently broken so I can't. And the teen is peeved that we have to stick our necks out on this as well. She'd much rather fly under the radar, but like, these kids are awful. And it's not fair to her that she has to spend her time there being subjected to this.

I wonder if we will actually be at this co-op for long. Sigh. I had such high hopes. Co-ops are always such minefields. Either too conservative, or poorly run or very cliquey or the parents are lazy and don't contribute like they're supposed to or or OR. 

This is one thing that's no better than public schools. Parents are parents everywhere and their kids spew whatever dumb BS the parents believe or what parents allow them to see online.

Anyway, garden update.

Hubby went to war with the yellowjackets and set their nest on fire (as well as causing fire to shoot out the mortar in the retaining wall much to the amusement of the firefighter next door) and sprayed glue down the hole so they abandoned the nest and have discovered the garden instead. Meaning, my autumn strawberry crop is toast, and if I try to pick anything, I get stung. 

Fun.

(See also: Why women live longer then men exhibit #1343340693807950948539487938485.)

A moment of silence, please for the strawberry crop. We have 4-5 different varieties, several of which are everbearing. We could be rolling in fat, juicy strawberries right now, but instead the yellow jackets are tunneling in and gorging on them. It's an absolute massacre. Sob.

Man, it's always something with gardening. Always something. Never set your heart on anything when it comes to gardening. Nature is a fickle bitch. Make like Buddha and nix the attachment.

Next year between the birds and the bugs, the strawberry beds will have to spend the entire season under netting. Boo.

I've got all the rhubarb in the ground finally. They aren't happy about being removed from their pots and were pretty stressed from the Japanese beetles so they may not make it. I doused them with some fish fertilizer and am hoping they perk up before winter. I've got one that got put in the ground from the start and it's happy as a clam so I've got that going for me. 

(Also, it turns out the Japanese beetles have a sweet spot on plant height. They like taller plants. Who knew? So all the rhubarb in pots got hit hard. The one on the ground...nothing.)

Do I like rhubarb? Actually, no. Not really. I don't hate it, but I also don't love it. But it's a perennial and the internet SWORE up and down that it had no pests which was a DIRTY LIE. The Japanese beetles absolutely feasted on it. We'll see. Half the family likes the stuff. If we can wrest the strawberries away from the yellow jackets, I can make some strawberry rhubarb goodness.

I've sowed the cold hardy lettuce in the spot we made for our cold frame. It's been so cool up here that I'm planting it early. I'm hoping to get cold frame gardening working for us, but I don't actually know what I'm doing. The big goal is to grow all our own lettuce and maybe some kale (if I can find the seeds, which who knows--one of the odder dynamics in our family system is all the other adults put my stuff wherever and don't tell me and then I never see it again*) all winter long. 

I'm doing garlic in pots...excited about that. Pretty much have those prepped and waiting. I. Can. NOT. Wait. For. Scapes. OMG. Delicious.

Waiting on the rest of my iris order. Hubby tilled a small landscaping hill that will get creeping thyme and phlox next spring and has the potential to look absolutely spectacular. 

And we're planning out a large potato and onion bed. The goal is to get the whole thing prepped with a combination till (because omg the weeds here are more hegemonic than Putin) and no till method before winter so that all we have to do in the spring is drop shit into the ground and profit. 

Plus we're working out how and where to grow pole beans. I want to see if I can get more production than I've had in the past. Hoping to get a trellis system up this fall so it's ready for spring. Since I'm halfway healthy right now, I'd like to work ahead as much as possible as who knows what'll be imploding by next spring? I have yet to have a healthy spring the last three years...

And did you know? Fruit trees get sunburn...in the winter? Yeah. It's a thing. I couldn't sleep after my second dose of prednisone for the MRI so I stayed up all night learning about it. Trees need sunblock apparently.  And they get cold. You're supposed to wrap the trunks in straw and burlap. I'm not sure if you need to do that every year or just when they're young, but basically I have to make some kind of winter sweater for my baby fruit trees.

At least I don't have to actually knit anything. I am far too dyslexic for that.

Oh, and I'm planning herbs. What herbs do I want to grow? My beautiful sage was the victim of involuntary manslaughter.  It was poisoned by salt when hubby left a bucket I thought was water in the garden, but was actually some kind of grass killing experiment (which there's no grass in the garden so like, why?). So replace the sage, more dill (love dill!), lemon verbana, valerian, and I can't remember what else. I am keeping a running list along with calendar reminders for when to order seeds...just can't remember it all off the top of my head.

Oops. Almost forgot calendula. Which is a rockstar in the garden. That thing self sows, blooms forever, and is hardy as fuck. I'm going to save the seeds and use them as easy landscaping flowers. Supposedly you can make a salve with it but I haven't gotten that far.

I will say, I am shit at harvesting herbs, but they smell amazing and pollinators love them so whatever. I can harvest any time. Figuring out how to grow things is what's tricky and where I need to gain experience.

On the organization side, I continue to find it difficult to plan out yields for stuff. Like, the internet will say, you need 10 plants per person, but that often doesn't connect with what I see happening in real time. So we're just kind of flinging stuff into the ground and we'll figure out the yield when it's in our hot little hands and iterate from there.

Random but real in the feels, I'm out of home grown onions and I'm so sad about it. Fresh onions are amazing. They are so sweet and they caramelize so beautifully when cooking. Sigh. I'm going to plant as many as I can next year. 

*I've been making people buy replacements of things I can't find because I'm a bitch like that and also GET A CLUE, PEOPLE, and I've finally gotten some designated storage space that's supposed to be off limits (which still gets fucked with but not as bad). The hard part about living in a total gut job is that you can't set anything up and establish good systems. The storage is transient or not there and space usage needs change depending on where we are in the remodel. 

At times, it's like having an entire household live out of one suitcase. So my things end up somewhere that conflicts with what someone else needs and vice versa. It's just a mess. All the time. Do not recommend.

BUT let the record show, I don't disappear other people's stuff. Maybe someday that will catch on...