Friday Report

I believe my back to school energy has done up and gone. All my zeal for organizing and setting things to rights--pffft! Disappeared. I hope it comes back. I love being organized and having the laundry folded and put away in drawers. I love a tidy house. And the funny thing is, a lot of times I like to tidy my house. I like getting a hausfrau vibe going. But at times like these, when I peter out around 4 p.m. and never quite revive, a professional tidy-upper would be quite nice.

(I cannot type the words "quit" or "quite" without first typing the word "quilt" and then having to go back and correct the error. I do it every dang time.)

Above: a picture of my daybook. Will gave me a lovely blank notebook for Christmas (remind me to show you the cover sometime), and I decide I would write in it every day. I record the weather, and whether or not I walked Travis, and what we had to eat and what books I read. A close up looks like this:

I did remarkably well up until August. In August I lost the thread. But I'm back in the habit (I hope) and will continue through the end of the year. Will I do it again next year? Possibly. The notebook has a lot of pages.

Tonight the Man and I went to Barnes and Noble to browse. Other than magazines, I rarely find anything when browsing around Barnes and Noble. It's better to go the Nice Price books on  Broad Street, which is overrun with old, dusty books,  many of them obscure and unexpected. That's the kind of place where the exact right book will jump into your arms like Harpo Marx and insist you take it home.

 

 Just like that.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about habits and trying to form some new ones. I'm trying to figure out how best to get myself to the gym three times a week to lift weights. I came up with a crazy scheme to go Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays right after I dropped off Jack at school. Why crazy? Because I won't do it. I don't want to lift weights first thing in the morning. I won't be able to get out of bed if I have to go to the gym before 9:00. I'll hide under the covers until lunch. So that's out.

Now I think I'll go right before lunch, after I'm done writing for the morning. The gym is fairly empty around lunchtime, so I won't have to glare at anyone who gets in my way. My plan is to write it on my desk calendar. If it's on the calendar, I have to do it, right?

I'm doing a good job sticking to my blogging schedule (which I also have written down on the calendar). My other new habit is sitting down after dinner and reading blogs and making comments. I feel like I'm being a better neighbor and doing a much better job keeping up with my many blogging friends.

Still, I think that's enough new habits for one season, don't you?

***

Can I confess something? I'm feeling a lot of garden guilt right now. Our garden is a mess. The tomatoes are still coming in like nobody's business, but we haven't weeded or done garden maintenance for ages. I'm not sure why. Last year I kept the garden nice and neat. My theory is that when we got a stretch of 100-degree days at the very beginning of summer, I immediately surrendered. That's it, I thought, I'm not leaving the house again until September. The funny thing is, for the most part the weather's been delightful since July. Dry, but relatively cool (mid-to-upper 80s for many, many weeks). Still, I let the garden go. Maybe once you turn off your garden mind, you can't turn it on again till the following spring.

Another theory is that we planted too much. By "we" I mean "the Man." He gets very excited in the spring and plants three times what we'll eat (with the exception of tomatoes, which I will throw into the freezer whole, if need be). It was impossible to keep up with the green beans, they were coming in so fast and furious, difficult to stay up to date with the cucumbers. At some point I threw in the towel.

I feel awful when I go out to the garden now. It looks terrible. It looks abandoned and weed-ridden. It is a strumpet's garden, the shame of the neighborhood.

The first frost cannot come soon enough.