Gardening Difficulties (Theft!)

A few days ago I bought some new native plants and put them in the ground: two bush mallows (Malacothamnus fremontii), a white sage (Salvia apiana), a second foothill beardtongue (Penstemon heterophyllus 'Blue Springs'), a second California fuchsia (Epilobium canum 'Calistoga Hybrids') - and in the front yard, two sacred datura (Datura wrightii). I put the last two in the front yard to keep them away from the dogs, because they're extremely poisonous if eaten. Relatedly, some people use them as hallucinogenic drugs, although this sounds like a particularly stupid choice of drugs to me, since (a) many people who attempt to use it accidentally overdose and die, and (b) most of the people who survive describe their experiences under the influence as having been severely unpleasant. It causes true hallucinations, meaning that the person hallucinating believes the hallucinations are real, unlike with the perceptual distortions caused by LSD. It also causes blindness and fever. And according to the Wikipedia entry about it, some users die not from overdose but rather because the terrifying hallucinations panic them and the inability to see prevents them from seeing where they're going, so they run into traffic and die from being hit by a car.

I also happened to have a related datura plant volunteering in the back yard (the non-native Datura stramonium), so I transplanted it to the front yard near the two native daturas to keep it away from the dogs. I've been watering all the new plants daily so far, because it's been so hot and I want to help them get their roots established as soon as possible so they can survive the heat. One of my new bush mallows has already been producing flowers. Boston dug up my other new bush mallow, so I replanted it and I'm hoping it will recover. My white sage seems to be struggling a bit, but all the other new plants seemed to be doing fine so far.

Except that this morning when I went out to get the newspaper, one of my new native daturas was missing. Completely missing - apparently someone dug it up and filled the hole back in when they were done. There was a 4th of July party on the street in front of our house last night, and in the driveway we share with the other half of our duplex, so I think one of the people at the party must have stolen my datura. And I think they probably stole it for drug purposes, because if they just wanted a pretty garden plant, it wasn't the most logical plant to steal. It wasn't blooming, and I had planted it in a bare spot in our sickly lawn, so that it looked rather as if it might have been a random weed. There are flowering plants in a bed by the front door - a monkeyflower in bloom, a purple alyssum in bloom, and some coral bells with the lingering remains of an old flower stalk. All three of those look prettier than my baby daturas just planted from 4-inch pots. I just can't imagine why anyone would want to steal my datura unless they recognized its drug use potential. And if someone was so familiar with its drug use potential that they recognized the plant on sight when it was tiny and not flowering, shouldn't they also be familiar enough with its drug use potential to know that using it is overwhelmingly likely to be unpleasant and also carries an unusually high risk of death?

This is really very irritating. At least when Boston digs up my plants in the back yard, I can put them back in the ground and hope for the best. When humans dig up my plants in the front yard and take the plants with them, all I can do is sit and wonder whether the person will accidentally kill themself as a result of the theft.

Mood: aggravated
Music: Susan rustling the newspaper

Susan's Birthday

Today is Susan's birthday. She is now an old lady of 43! I gave her some books (by Jung Chang, M. F. K. Fisher, Nega Mezlekia, and Aung San Suu Kyi), a DVD of the complete Fawlty Towers TV series, a sun-tea container, some socks, and a new pair of tennis shoes. She decided to have birthday cake before dinner rather than after dinner, so I pushed 43 candles into the cake I had bought her and attempted to light them all. Susan helped me light them, but some of them still burned almost down to cake level by the time we finished lighting them.

We went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner, because Susan had been craving spicy-hot chicken vindaloo. I have zero tolerance for any degree whatsoever of spicy-hotness, so I generally avoid Indian restaurants, but Susan said she would be able to recommend foods there that I could eat. The restaurant was a tiny little place in which the woman serving us seemed to also be the chef. We had four shared appetizers - papadom, veggie samosas, aloo paratha, and garlic naan. The papadom came first, with two different sauces to put on it. Susan tried them both and told me the red sauce was sweet and the green sauce was minty. I tried them both and concluded that the red sauce was spicy-hot and yucky and the green sauce was spicy-hot and yucky with vegetable-flavored yuckiness mixed in. I declined to eat any more, so Susan ate mine. Then the veggie samosas arrived. Susan said they were good and that I could pick out the peas (because I hate to eat anything green). I said they were spicy-hot and inedible, so Susan ate mine. When the aloo paratha arrived, I found it to be spicy-hot and inedible also, but the garlic naan was all right. So I ate garlic naan and drank mango lassi. The mango lassi was absolutely delicious, so much so that I thought I would look for it at the local Indian grocery stores in the future - except that it turns out to contain yogurt rather than a rice drink as Susan had claimed, and it did somewhat bother my lactose intolerance, so I guess I shouldn't look for it after all. Susan tried my mango lassi and hated it, because she hates mango flavoring.

My chicken biriyani contained an awful lot of vegetables for me to pick out, but I was relieved to find that it was not spicy-hot; it was flavored only with tomato sauce. It was edible, though not delicious. Susan's chicken vindaloo, however, was apparently not spicy-hot at all either. She even gave me a bit of the potato from it, and I confirmed that it was in fact not spicy-hot at all. She was disappointed by this, and attempted to express her disappointment to the server/chef by saying that it didn't have the spicy kick she had been expecting. The server/chef misinterpreted this as a compliment and exclaimed that she had tasted it and made sure it wasn't spicy - she was apparently convinced that because Susan is white, Susan couldn't possibly actually want her food flavored the way she had ordered it. Susan was too cowed after this response to try again to request spiciness. I was extremely amused by this, not least because the restaurant's racial stereotyping would have been entirely accurate if they had only applied it to me - in fact, they apparently didn't racially stereotype me enough, since so many of the appetizers were too spicy-hot for me to be able to eat them. We agreed that it is practically impossible for anyone to be any more white than I am, at least food-wise. Well, and skin color-wise, too. Poor Susan, stereotyped as having the same food preferences as me, just because her ancestors are from the same continent as mine.

Now Susan is feeling a bit ill from eating too much, no doubt because she had to eat my share of all but one of our appetizers. I probably should not be so amused by the fact that her birthday dinner went awry.

And now, on a completely unrelated note: Look at Stardust and Ganymede sleeping next to each other! We have such adorable pets.



Mood: amused
Music: fish tank filter

Snake Lake

This past weekend, Susan and I went camping at Snake Lake in Plumas County. We chose it partly because it's at an elevation of 4,200 feet, which we were hoping would be high enough to be above the heat of the Sacramento Valley. It was 111 degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celsius) at our home when we returned on Sunday afternoon. However, it was 96 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) at the campground on Saturday afternoon while we were there, which is not really cool enough to be comfortable either. So I think that as an attempt to escape the heat, the trip was a failure; we would have been better off staying home where we have air conditioning.

Another reason we chose Snake Lake was because it's near Butterfly Valley Botanical Area, which I wanted to visit while we were there. This was kind of a flop too, in that we never succeeded in visiting Butterfly Valley Botanical Area. We did drive from our campsite at Snake Lake to nearby Smith Lake, and the southern end of Butterfly Valley Botanical Area extends to approximately the northern shore of Smith Lake. But we ended up on the southwestern shore of Smith Lake rather than the northern shore, and there were no interesting plants there, and it was much too hot for either of us to feel like walking all the way around to the northern shore just on the off-chance that the plants might be more interesting there. However, back at out own campsite on Snake Lake, I did find a huge number of plants that I'd never seen before, so I think the unusual botanical diversity that Butterfly Valley Botanical Area was established to protect was somewhat evident even beyond the boundaries of the official Botanical Area.

But let's start with the drive there. We took the Feather River Scenic Byway, so we were driving next to the Feather River North Fork for most of the way. We stopped once to get sodas from the ice chest for each of us and admire the river. Here is Susan with Boston.



( Click for more! )

Mood: happy
Music: Pat walking around in her mouse cage

Michael Jackson

It's kind of bizarre to see how much fuss is being made over the death of a singer whose career, though huge in its time, had been practically nonexistent for more than a decade - not due to any loss of interest on his part in continuing to make music, but rather to a very vocal loss of interest on the part of his audience. However, I think the news coverage is mistaken in implying that his major contribution to the culture was his music. Certainly he was one of the few most successful singers of all time, for a while, but he does have some competition for that spot. There's another, very different cultural contribution for which he was absolutely unrivalled, and therefore even more important than he was musically: he was the ultimate pop cultural pariah.

I think that our culture, like most cultures, feels a real need for pariahs: people that absolutely anyone who wants to can feel securely superior to. Pariahs are often people who break gender roles, such as the hijras in India, and Michael Jackson did that. But our culture has many other hierarchies in addition to gender that are taboo to mess with, and Michael Jackson managed to get himself on the widely disapproved of side of all of them. He went not only from male to almost female (probably the single most taboo path to follow in breaking gender norms) but also from black to basically white (again, the single most taboo path to follow), and from being adored for his successful career and incredible wealth to being a symbol of the ultimate in ridiculous misplaced vanity made possible by money: he had so many plastic surgeries to try to achieve some elusive standard of beauty that he very visibly destroyed his nose cartilage and ended up almost universally regarded as one of the ugliest people on the planet. At that point, just about the only thing left that he could have done to make himself more reviled was to get accused of child molest - which, of course, he promptly did.

I'm not suggesting that he planned any of this. He certainly doesn't seem to have enjoyed the resulting alienation of much of his fan base. But for whatever reasons, he did end up as the ultimate pop cultural pariah, and it does seem to me that his contributions to the culture in that way are even more completely unrivalled than his contributions as a musician. So I find it a little awkward that the news anchors seem to be trying to avoid talking about that, apparently for lack of being able to figure out how to do so without being gratuitously cruel to the dead.

But then, perhaps my view is skewed by the fact that I never heard of Michael Jackson until 1987, when I saw him in Captain Eo at Disneyland and was thoroughly repulsed. By that point he had already undergone a lot of his plastic surgeries and skin bleachings. I was eleven years old and had never even listened to the radio. Costumes and dance styles I was unfamiliar with frightened me, and the fact that my parents expressed similar repulsion and explained that his appearance had been drastically altered by plastic surgery and skin bleaching certainly didn't help matters. So I never experienced the Michael Jackson who, for some period of time, was perceived as just a great singer and not a pariah. I never bought his music or took much notice of it. So the only Michael Jackson I ever really knew about is the one who's almost impossible for the news anchors to express grief over, because talking about him is almost inseparable from mocking him. But I do feel that this aspect of him has at least as much to do with the world's seeming fascination with his death as his (largely destroyed) musical career does. For better or for worse, and whether or not they're willing to admit it, people feel a certain need for pariahs, and it's hard to imagine anyone ever again fulfilling that function as well as he did.

Mood: contemplative
Music: fish tank filter

June Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Although it's only June, my garden is starting to visibly decline from the peak of its May glory. We had a huge lightning storm on June 4 - lightning experts were quoted in the newspaper saying that it was the most prolonged and intense lightning storm they'd ever seen anywhere in the world, and the map in the newspaper showed that our town was right in the center where the storm was most intense of all - and a lot of the flowers were knocked down by that. My poppies are looking increasingly dog-trampled, the smaller of my two silver bush lupines shriveled up and turned brown while we were camping at Little North Fork (I think this was from drought - it looks dead but it actually isn't, so I've been watering it now in hopes it will recover), Boston dug up my evergreen currant and my blue elderberry (the former looks like it may recover, but the latter looks like it won't), and either Boston or Ganymede or both leaped into my volunteer willowherb and broke off 90% of the branches at ground level. Also, bermudagrass is taking over the entire yard with a ferocity that I don't remember it demonstrating last summer. But then, last summer I only had two plants, so I was more free to douse the yard with herbicide to kill everything in sight.

Anyway, you won't be able to tell from most of these photographs that my garden is in decline, because I took most of these photographs at the end of May, before the decline began. For example, when I took this photograph, Boston was still the only dog in the family. She posed with catmint and deergrass (both in the foreground), beardtongue, poppies, and silver bush lupine (all in the background to the right of her).



( More garden pictures )

Mood: accomplished
Music: fish tank filter

Ganymede

Susan and I got a new dog today. She saw an ad in the newspaper for a one-year-old male Labrador/Pitbull/Pyrenees mix, and read it aloud to me along with some other ads, and asked me whether she should call about any of them. She seemed to be leaning toward that one. I told her that I thought a one-year-old dog would be a good age for us - old enough not to completely bounce off the walls all day, but young enough to be in good health for many years in the future. I said she should go ahead and call if she wanted to call, so she called about that ad. The dog described in the ad was already gone, but the people had another dog they needed to get rid of too, that they hadn't described in the ad. This other dog was also a one-year-old male, supposedly a mix of German Shepherd, Heeler, Labrador, and Malamute.

We drove to a trailer park to meet the dog. We brought Boston with us to see how they would interact. Boston tends to be afraid of everyone and everything, so we were worried that a new dog might dominate her too much. It was pretty clear that Susan was likely to be crazy about almost any dog at all, but I'm not much of a dog person, so I was worried that I would probably hate it. The people had said on the phone that the dog looked like a miniature Rottweiler. I ran a Google image search on Rottweilers and concluded that the dog was likely to be hideous.

When we arrived in the trailer park, the dog turned out to be the sweetest, gentlest dog ever, and rather cute too! His behavior impressed me immediately - he behaved much better than Boston did. Boston was actually behaving rather better than she sometimes does, but she still barked a little and at one point even escaped from Susan and ran off to chase the people's cat, dragging her leash behind her. The other dog stayed right with us and never barked at all. The man there explained that the dog had belonged to his sister, who apparently has a habit of adopting dogs but neglecting them terribly so that she can never keep one for as long as six months. He took the dog away from his sister, but he couldn't keep it himself.

Anyway, we were both very impressed by him, and we both decided right away that he was the right dog for us. So we brought him home, and Susan has named him Ganymede, after the mortal male lover of Zeus. Ganymede needs to be neutered and given his adult shots, so we will be taking care of that later this week. He's a 40-pound dog (about the same size as Boston but about 10 pounds skinnier than her) and looks very much like a Heeler/German Shepherd mix, although we can't see any trace of his supposed Labrador/Malamute heritage. He didn't know any commands whatsoever, although we've been working on teaching him "Sit" this evening. But he is an extremely easy-going dog, and so submissive that it appears that Boston may actually be the top dog in the house for a change.



( One more of Ganymede, and one each of Boston and Stardust )

Mood: excited
Music: Ganymede panting over my shoulder

Project Pushback: Same-Sex Marriage Commercials

Projecct Pushback is asking people to vote on which of about 70 different commercials should be used in future same-sex marriage campaigns. You can vote for as many as you like, but you can only cast one vote for each. I voted for My Two Moms, I Am #1, Evolution, Family Values, Remembering Chuck and Carl, Marriage by Committee, and License.

There were three others that I feel were good enough to deserve mention, although I decided not to vote for them. A Friend's Take has an interesting narrative approach (showing a heterosexual Christian talking about coming to terms with his gay brother) and a really adorable gay male couple, but I decided not to vote for it for two reasons. One is that the very last line unfortunately leaves the impression that supporting same-sex marriage basically comes down to disregarding the Bible after all, instead of changing people's minds about what the Bible actually asks them to do - I'm quite certain that the Bible doesn't say you have to vote against allowing secular governments to recognize the marriages of other people who don't necessarily even belong to your religion. The other reason is that - extremely unfortunately - I don't think the homophobes we need to reach through commercials like this are ready to handle as much physical affection between two males as this video shows. They are a wonderful couple and I wish the homophobes could recognize and admire that, but I think that instead, the homophobes would just be incensed that two cute gay boys are being allowed to have more fun than them. (I feel badly about this second reason - can you tell? This helped persuade me to vote for "Family Values" and "Remembering Chuck and Carl," because I felt I ought to vote for at least something with gay men in it. If they're sufficiently old and wrinkled and/or fathers, do they eventually become less threatening to homophobes?)

Reaching Towards Liberty has some good aspects, but it strikes a false note with the fact that its only reference to racial discrimination is to interracial marriage. It refers to gender discrimination in terms of women not having been allowed to vote, but gives the bizarre impression that the only discrimination that black people ever had to fight against was laws that prevented them from marrying white people. I think this commercial as currently written will just offend people and turn them against us. However, it could be fairly easily edited to include a much better quick summary of racial discrimination than that one, which I think would turn this into a pretty good commercial.

A Wish has some good aspects too, but the narrator's tearful voice gets a bit over the top, and I distrust the antiquated terminology referring to a "homosexual man" instead of a "gay man."

Oh, and please don't vote for the stupid Marriage Equality video that does nothing but scream "We're born that way! It's not a choice! We can't help it!" - well, and it also misspells "lesbian," if that can be considered to count as doing something. Let's start actually applying Rule #2 of The Dallas Principles, shall we? Queer by choice people are part of the queer community and should not be shoved into a closet and left behind.

Mood: interested
Music: fish tank filter

Camping at Little North Fork

Susan and I spent our three-day Memorial Day weekend at Little North Fork Campground. The campsites are directly on the bank of the Feather River North Fork, which is what gives the campground its name. Here is our tent by the river.



( More pictures )

Mood: relaxed
Music: fish tank filter

Proposition H8

California: a state embroiled in a seemingly neverending budget crisis because a two-thirds majority is required to approve a budget, but where a simple 50% + 1 is sufficient to vote away the rights of minority couples to marry - even when discrimination against that group is supposed to be subject to "strict scrutiny," and even when the people never voted to remove the contradictory part of the state constitution that claims the state guarantees equal rights to everyone.

Also, the crazy Catholic self-hating lesbian on the California Supreme Court voted against her own right to marry, again. It was not a surprise, considering that she also voted against her own right to marry last May, when the majority on the court ruled that we did have the right to marry. This woman must have the most terrible commitment issues ever.

Really, the only thing that surprised me was that Justice Moreno was the only dissenter in today's decision. When I watched the oral arguments in March, I really thought that Justice Werdegar was going to dissent also.

(At least I suppose I can take some comfort in the fact that 18,000 same-sex couples who married here do get to remain married, despite the attempt by 52% of California voters to forcibly divorce them from each other. Congratulations again to misterkrista and jess_s, to Chuck B. and Guy, and to James and John.)

Mood: NOT HAPPY
Music: GRRRRRRRR

May Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

One of the main reasons I became interested in growing California native plants was that I recognized my own brown thumb, and also recognized the fact that I would have no patience with the arduous task of watering plants regularly all summer long, which is what most non-native plants require to be able to grow here. As I learned more about California native plants, however, I began to question whether they were really any easier to grow. Most California native plants sold in nurseries are native to the foothills, where they've evolved to adapt to steeply sloped, sandy soils with perfect drainage. I live in the Sacramento Valley, with heavy clay soils that are absolutely flat and have no drainage whatsoever. There are plants native to the valley as well, of course, but a huge percentage of them are annuals, evolved to reproduce quickly and die off within a year or less, because that's the easiest way for plants to adapt to being both completely flooded in the winter and bone-dry in the summer. Gardens full of plants that all die off every year don't tend to look very good at the time of year when the plants die.

Now, however, I have resumed believing that even though plants from the California foothills aren't as well adapted to growing in the valley as I would like, they're still quite a bit easier to grow here than plants from outside of California. This is because although I've certainly had my share of native plants die in my garden, I've now made a significant effort at growing plants from the Mediterranean Basin for the first time. And it didn't go well.

Last month, as I explained shortly before last month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I planted six Mediterranean plants from four-inch pots: 'Provence' lavender, 'Hopley's' oregano, 'Spice Island' rosemary, Caraway thyme, 'Minus' thyme, and 'Walker's Low' catmint.This month, four of the six are dead. The only surviving intentionally planted non-California native plants in my garden now are Caraway thyme and Walker's Low catmint. I'm not really sure whether the Caraway thyme is happy either, but I suppose the good news is that at least the catmint is actively growing. It's even produced one small cluster of tiny bluish purple flowers.

Aside from the deaths of most of my Mediterranean plants, however, the month of May has mostly lived up to the promotional hype it receives from May Dreams Gardens. Most of my plants, whether or not they're blooming, have grown very noticeably in the past month. My California golden poppies, which last month were only intermittently producing a single flower at a time, are now three times their previous size and covered with many dozens of simultaneous flowers (as shown in the background below). My 'Blue Springs' beardtongue, which last month had produced only two flowers, is now covered with flowers and beginning to produce seeds as well. It's really impressing me. I need to collect the seeds and try to grow a lot more of it.



( Click to see the rest of this month's blooms! )

Mood: accomplished
Music: tree frogs outside

The City That Hates Trees

In January, about a week after I finished moving in with Susan, I witnessed something strange: a bunch of men using cranes to drape black netting over all the trees in the park that serves as the town square of the town where I now live. I wondered what in the world they were doing that for, but it never occurred to me to fear the netting would be left there long-term. Yet that's what's happened. Nearly five months later, all 15 trees in this section of the park - mostly elm trees, ranging from 30 to 100 feet tall - remain completely enclosed in black netting, with no prospect of the netting being removed anytime soon.



Why? Because the city council hates trees. Really, that's about the sum of it. The city council has been attempting to sell the park for several years now - yes, that's right, I live in a town that's trying to sell its own town square! - to companies that would like to turn the park into a parking lot. But the attempted sales were blocked because the city council hadn't completed the required environmental impact report. That report is now completed, so the city is once again trying to sell the park. One of the environmental impacts the city now fears could block the next attempted sale is the fact that it is illegal to destroy the habitat of certain rare birds by chopping down trees that those rare birds are nesting in.

To make sure the trees can legally be chopped down to build a parking lot, the city has wrapped the trees in black netting for the foreseeable future, so that those rare birds can't possibly nest in these trees. In other words, the city council has reacted to the environmental laws intended to prevent the destruction of rare birds' habitat by intentionally destroying the rare birds' habitat even sooner than this habitat would have been destroyed with no such environmental laws in place.

( More pictures )

Mood: irritated
Music: mice squeaking

Where Taco Died

These are my photographs of the campground where we lost Taco. I have no pictures of Taco himself there.

These are some old logs in our campsite. You can see a bit of our tent in the background.



( and so on . . . )

Mood: grieving
Music: silence

R.I.P. Taco

Susan and I took Taco and Boston camping this weekend, but we came back home with only Boston. We lost Taco. Literally lost him. We have no choice but to assume that he's dead.

I didn't even get around to taking any pictures of him on this camping trip before we lost him, so here's a picture of him at PiPi Campground in August 2007, the first camping trip I ever went on with him.



( . . . )

Mood: sobbing
Music: mouse wheel squeaking

Native Plant Garden Photo Contest

Gardening Gone Wild is having a native plant garden photo contest. Participants can enter up to three photos. Here are mine. The first one is red bush monkeyflower (Mimulus puniceus) in my front garden bed this morning, with coral bells (Heuchera maxima) in the background. Both plants are native to southern California. (I'm in northern California, but these plants are under the eaves where they get less rain, making the environment closer to souther California's.) The monkeyflower just started blooming last week, for the first time.



( Two more )

Mood: accomplished
Music: wind outside

Civil War II

Why is hardly anyone talking about the utter lunacy that the Georgia state senate voted 43 to 1 to support? Why do people go around accusing Democrats of being "anti-American" for any un-Republican statements they ever make, yet when the Georgia state senate votes overwhelmingly to secede from the United States and declare the United States "disbanded" as a nation, nobody seems to get particularly upset about how anti-American that is? And since this thing the Georgia state senate voted for states in part that the federal government has no authority to prosecute any crimes other than "treason, piracy and slavery," why do none of these same Georgia state senators seem to have considered the idea that declaring the United States to have been "disbanded" as a nation sounds an awful lot like an incitement to begin committing treason?

Meanwhile, the governor of Texas has apparently declared an interest in seceding from the United States too! legolastn commented, "Is it really coincidence that the Georgia Senate and the Texas Governor have started touting secessionist rhetoric while the nation is being [led] by its first black President? Somehow I think not." Unfortunately, I have to agree.

Mood: disgusted
Music: fish tank filter

April Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Now that yesterday's post about the less beautiful aspects of my garden is out of the way, it's time once again for Garden Blogger's Bloom Day. And unlike last month's Bloom Day, I finally have more intentional flowers than weed flowers!

This is the flower bed in front of our front door. Susan planted the yellow snapdragons and the purple flowers (whatever they are) before I met her, in a little rectangular bed encompassing only those two and the space between them (which used to have some other kind flower in it that died long ago). Last November, I expanded the bed into a quarter-circle and added the large rock, a monkeyflower (not pictured here because it's not blooming yet) and coral bells. Since then I've also added larkspur (not pictured here because it's not blooming either). But the coral bells are blooming, as are the two surviving flowers that Susan planted.



( Click to read the rest of this entry . . . there are more flowers! )

Mood: accomplished
Music: windstorm outside

Garden Update

This month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day is coming soon, and I'm saving my flower pictures for then. But in the meantime, I have a lot of other gardening news to catch up with. And it's still, well, rather easy to take photographs of my garden without including any flowers.

I'd actually been feeling pretty good about the garden lately. Most of it is far from beautiful, but more and more of it is at least starting to look recognizably like a garden. I was going to show you the photograph below and exclaim with pride that finally, at long last, there were hardly any weeds visible at all.

Except . . . see all that stuff along the house that looks like a tall grass? I had thought that was something I planted, but I realized while writing this post that it's a weed, yellow nutsedge (Carex esculentus). It's not just along the house, either; a whole lot of the green clumps you see in the middle are the same stuff. It's native, but allelopathic - meaning that it might chemically kill my other plants - and it's almost impossible to remove, because it resprouts from "nuts" left behind in the soil after you pull it. Most herbicides are also incapable of killing the nuts. I did identify some yellow nutsedge in the yard last summer, and sprayed it with herbicide, and it turned brown and looked dead, so I thought that took care of the problem. But it resprouted, and I failed to recognize it as the same stuff until now. I will have to try to dig it out, and I will undoubtedly fail. It tends to establish itself in areas with poor drainage, which out yard has certainly suffered from plenty of - but it doesn't go away, even if the drainage improves.



( More flowerless garden pictures )

Mood: mixed, more negative than positive at the moment
Music: kids outside

Homophobia on Amazon.com

Queer books listed on Amazon.com and its international affiliate sites have lately been losing their sales rank statistics and ceasing to show up in certain searches. In response to an inquiry about this from gay novelist Mark R. Probst, Amazon has explained that it been removing its sales rank statistics from books with content it deems "adult," to prevent them from showing up in certain searches. Mark R. Probst has posted a screenshot of Amazon's explanation here.

Concerned witnesses are compiling a list of the book titles affected here. Having read many of these books myself, I can assure you that a great many of them have absolutely no sex in them whatsoever. They range from the most utterly un-prurient Victorian novels such as E. M. Forster's Maurice to modern children's books such as Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (click and look! it's been stripped of its sales rank!) to nonfiction such as Shane L. Windmeyer's The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, John J. McNeill's The Church and The Homosexual, and Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.

Amazon's formula for defining books as "adult" appears to be triggered by the specific words "lesbian" and "gay." For example, one edition of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness was subtitled "A 1920s Classic of Lesbian Fiction." That edition has had its sales rank removed, while editions without the subtitle still have their sales rank. (vashtan correctly points out that the only "sex scene" in The Well of Loneliness consists in its entirety of the words "And that night they were not divided.")

Classifying any book with the words "lesbian" or "gay" in its title as "adult" is like classifying any book with the words "husband" or "wife" in its title as "adult." Exactly like the words "husband" and "wife," the words "lesbian" and "gay" are used to specify the gender of a partner in a romantic relationship. This does not usually entail describing sexual encounters! In fact, unlike the words "husband" and "wife," which tend to imply that the people in question do have sex or at least did have sex at some point or other, the words "lesbian" and "gay" do not even imply that sex has ever happened at all (much as some of us might wish that being lesbian or gay automatically guaranteed sex . . .). Amazon would never in a million years use a formula that automatically classified books with the words "husband" or "wife" in the titles as "adult." If they did, the entire Disney empire and Grimm's Fairy Tales 95% of all children's books everywhere would be classified as "adult."

Amazon's formula indicates that Amazon believes our entire existences as families are unsuitable for children to know about. Many of these books were written specifically for children (such as Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies was) or for teenagers. To deem them "adult" and restrict access accordingly is to destroy their entire purpose. Yet Amazon believes the words "lesbian" or "gay" are words children need to be protected from ever hearing.

(Update: Now that there's been a huge Internet uproar about the issue, Amazon has changed its form letter responses to say that they recognize this as being a problem and are working on fixing it. Still no explanation of how the problem happened in the first place, though - unless you count the fact that a former employee named Mike Daisey seems to think he knows what happened.)

Additional links can be found here and here. Thanks to mariness for passing this on.

Mood: horrified
Music: fish tank filter noise

Happy 17th Birthday to My Queerness!

This is the year it will graduate from high school. Do you think that when it turns 18, it will gain the legal right to get married?

In the meantime, congratulations to the queernesses of Iowans, Vermonters, and D.C. residents.

Mood: pleased for others, discontented for myself
Music: fish filter

Table Mountain, Oroville

Yesterday, Susan and I took the dogs to Table Mountain in Oroville. It was only a half-hour drive, and the mountain is famous for its spring wildflower displays. We went a little early in the season, but the array of flowers was already impressive. Even more impressive to me, however, was the intense greennness of the wooded areas we drove through on the east side of the mountain. Tragically, I didn't get any pictures of these areas, because there weren't many good places to stop the car, and because I thought I could take some on the way back instead. But on the way back we went around the west side of the mountain, which turned out not to be half as beautiful a drive. Oh well. Even if I had gotten pictures, it would be impossible for you to look at the pictures without concluding that I must have just quintupled the saturation of the color green to make the pictures artificially greener than the actual place. The actual place was the greenest place I've ever seen. I'd had no idea that oak trees, which are the dominant tree all over the Sacramento Valley but which are normally seen in various muted shades from olive green to grey-green, could be so bright a green. It was amazing. I wonder whether they're still as green later in the season, or just for a few weeks in spring.

At least I got pictures of the top of the mountain, which was less green but contained the largest number of wildflowers. Here is Susan with the dogs, sitting amid native annual sky lupines (the blue flowers: Lupinus nanus) and goldfields (the yellow flowers: Lasthenia californica).



( more pictures of Table Mountain )

Mood: delighted
Music: fish tank filter

Animals!

We have animals! Lots and lots of new animals. Today I went to the pet store and bought two tiny, unbelievably adorable mice. I named the brown and white one Cookie, because she's the same colors as a dog I had when I was a kid, that I named Cookie because she was the same colors as a cookie. Susan named the mostly white one with a small grey spot at the base of its tail Pat, because she knows a lesbian couple named Pat and Cookie. (Both the mice are female.)



( Our other new animals are . . . )

Mood: excited
Music: Susan is watching women's basketball on TV

Quote from Susan Cheever

Susan just read this out loud to me, and we are both delighted by it:

As a parent, [John Cheever] could be loving and companionable but was also sharply sarcastic and, in what he confided to his children, merciless. With the two oldest, Susan and Benjamin, he made no secret of his disappointments. Susan, who resembled him in her compulsions, wild streak, and intelligence, was overweight in spite of both parents' relentless nagging; she told Bailey, "In many ways I was a tremendous disappointment to them, I'm proud to say, and hope I've continued to be, since what they wanted me to be is pretty empty."
          —John Updike, "Basically Decent: A big biography of John Cheever" (review of Blake Bailey's John Cheever: A Life), The New Yorker, March 9, 2009

Mood: interested
Music: the neighbors' music

My First Bloom Day

On the 15th of every month, garden bloggers everywhere participate in "Bloom Day" by posting photographs of whatever is blooming in their yard that day, and then they all link to their posts from a central location in the May Dreams Gardens blog. I've never been able to participate in Bloom Day before, because I've never had anything blooming. This time I do, although it's still no comparison to anybody else's. I have two intentionally planted plants blooming, and two . . . well . . . weeds. But the kind of weeds I'm not going to pull out.

The golden currant (Ribes aureum) that bloomed first has now fully opened its four flower clusters. Not bad for a one-gallon plant I just bought last November.



( Bloom Day! )

Mood: accomplished
Music: silence

Garden

I invented a new weeding technique this week. All winter I've been pulling annual bluegrass and trying to leave it roots-up on the ground to serve as mulch, but the pulled clumps often seem to go right on growing, with just the amount of dirt in their uprooted clods. Worse, the weight of the dirt makes the roots heavier than the tops, such that the pulled clods sometimes manage to right themselves and essentially replant themselves. So this week I stopped using them as mulch, and instead piled them all atop each other and spread a thin layer of mud on top to make berms. Then I planted my newest batch of plants in these berms, to keep their roots up above the flood zone and thereby hopefully prevent them from drowning.

The ground is completely sopping wet out there, both because of the huge rainstorms we had all through February and because our next-door neighbors apparently accidentally left a hose running in their back yard for days and days on end. And the first rule of gardening in clay soil is that one must never, ever dig when the soil is wet, because this compacts the microscopic clay particles and makes the drainage worse than ever. But I completely disregarded this rule, because I had plants to put in the ground and I really wanted to get on with it. We'll see whether I end up paying for this later. So far I think it's worked just fine, because the pockets of air in the bluegrass seem to have oxygenated the thin layer of clay on top, turning the clay in my berms a distinctly redder tint than the clay in the rest of the yard, and making me think that the plants on the berms will have much better drainage than they otherwise would have. But again, we'll see.

Here's one of my new plants on a muddy bluegrass berm: hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea). It's native to the coast from the Bay Area southward, and should develop hot pink flowers if it survives long enough. Isn't the mud disgusting, though? You can't imagine how badly Boston manages to cover herself in mud when the yard is like this.



( More pictures: lupine, larkspur, fairyfan, mariposa lily, soap lily, potato, carrot )

Mood: accomplished
Music: tree frogs croaking outside

My Garden's First Flowers!

My garden has produced its first flowers ever! Some of my plants did have flowers on them when I first bought them, and it's possible they grew additional flowers after I put them in the yard, but it's also possible they didn't. Today, though, for the first time, I found flowers in my garden that definitely were not already there at the nursery. My golden currant (Ribes aureum) that I bought last November is blooming for the first time, in the back yard.



None of my other plants are blooming yet, though. There are California golden poppies blooming in other people's yards all over town, but I have a back yard full of non-blooming California golden poppies. I haven't even seen any buds. There are also various trees blooming all over town, but my redbud tree doesn't have a single bud.

Still, I have currant flowers! I can't be a total failure at gardening, because I managed to make at least one plant happy enough that it's producing flowers.

Mood: accomplished