May Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Happy May Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day! Spring is definitely winding down now, but you probably won't be able to tell that from these pictures, since I took most of them two weeks ago, when the garden was still more or less at its peak. As I said last month, this was definitely a banner year for the blue flax. It was a slow year for a lot of native annuals - baby blue eyes, Chinese pagodas, tidy tips, maybe even the two gilia species, a bit. But the blue flax put on a good enough show to make up for the relative absence of the others.



( 55 more pictures! )

Mood: busy

Why Dogs and Backyard Swamps Don't Go Well Together

I've decided to try a new dog-parenting technique: publicly humiliating our misbehaving dog in front of all her admiring public. That's right: you, the people who've previously commented on what a cute and adorable dog she is, shall now see the disaster she inflicted on our home today.

We have, as you've no doubt seen in previous posts of mine, a swamp in our back yard. It's not just ordinary rain puddles the water remains standing on the surface for weeks or even months on end, to the point that it develops a thick layer of green pond scum. It also reeks, in the way that only water left standing for weeks or months can reek. Particularly water with vast amounts of organic matter (dog poop, drowned plants, partially composted kitchen scraps, and so on) decaying in it. The entire yard reeks. I'm sure all the neighbors directly adjacent to us can smell it. I'd feel a need to apologize profusely to them, if not for the fact that in this neighborhood, the smell of a reeking yard is by far the least of anyone's problems.

Anyway, Boston sometimes goes wading in the swamp. This is actually less of a problem in the middle of winter, when the water level is at its highest, because at least it's liquid enough not to stick to her too much. But in the spring, when the water level recedes, the swamp turns into extremely thick muck. Extremely thick muck that Boston sinks into right up to her neck. Which, unfortunately, she loves.

Usually her dive into the muck is precipitated by her effort to dig out a rock or a toy to play with. For this reason, her dive into the muck usually occurs while one or both of us are out in the yard with her, so we see that she's filthy, and we wash her off before she tracks the mud indoors. Today while I was at work in my office with the door closed, Susan saw Boston covered in muck and washed her off. Then Susan went out in the front yard and left Boston indoors. This was where things went badly wrong.

Our pet door is open to the dogs at all times, because Ganymede broke the barrier that we used to be able to insert into the pet door to block the dogs on one side or the other. So when Susan went in the front yard, Boston went through the pet door into the back yard. And then she went back into the muck. And then she came back in the house and tracked mucky footprints all over the house. And did I mention that these footprints reek?

Here is where she came in through the pet door.



( six more disaster photographs )

Mood: aghast

April Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

It's April, and the garden is gorgeous! I'm a little late to Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, but that's because I have so many pictures to show you. I don't think our front sidewalk garden has ever been prettier.



( Click here for more gorgeous pictures of my garden! )

Mood: pleased

March Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

I finally have enough flowers in the yard again for it to be worth writing a Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day post. The back yard is currently mostly underwater, but the flowers in the back yard are mostly on the shrubs, so they're still visible above the water line. Here is the golden currant (Ribes aureum) in full glory. It bloomed earlier than usual this year - it's been going strong for nearly a full month now - so I think it's going to begin winding down very soon.



( More pretty flowers! )

Mood: busy

Walking Around the Neighborhood

I tried to prepare a Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day Post, but the only flowers in the yard right now are the scarlet mallow that blooms year-round, a few golden currant flowers that are too tiny for my camera to focus on properly, a giant gumplant bud that's too tiny at the moment for my camera to focus on properly, and some ribbed fringepod buds that are so microscopic that even though my camera miraculously did focus on them properly, they still just look like tiny white dots that don't seem worth showing off. So in lieu of boring you to death with pictures of our yard, I'm going to show you some pictures from my recent walks around the neighborhood instead. I took Boston for a walk to the Yuba River on New Year's Day, and I took her for a walk in the other direction last weekend. Susan and Ganymede stayed home both times, because Susan's foot hasn't fully healed from when she broke it last spring, and I'm not comfortable trying to handle more than one dog at a time.

Now I will show you pictures from both walks.

( Pictures! )

Mood: okay

Apparently I Can See

Today I went to get my eyes checked for the first time in, oh, about fifteen years? I first got glasses when I was 17 and woke up one day to find that I could no longer read the words on the calendar hanging on the wall opposite my bed, which I was certain I had been able to read the week before. My mother took me to an optometrist who told me that actually my eyes were still good enough that I probably didn't really need glasses, but that since I had noticed the change in my vision, he would go ahead and give me glasses anyway. I picked out wireframes with giant round lenses that were brass on the sides but had a purple facing around the lenses with black dots on it.

In the car in the way home, I got excited about being able to see individual blades of grass in the lawn. But within a week or so of getting glasses, I settled into a pattern of wearing my glasses only when I left the house, never when I was at home. The frames were a little heavy, no doubt partly because I'd picked ones with such large lenses, and my ears got tired of holding them up if I wore them every waking moment. Besides, my nearsightedness was mild enough that there was never really any need for me to wear them at home. I needed my glasses to drive, to see street signs, and even to see what teachers wrote on the board in front of the classroom or what the signs in the hallways said when I walked around school. It was even kind of useful to have glasses when conversing with people at school, because the glasses helped me to see subtler details of people's facial expressions. But at home, when I already knew what all the printed materials said and I already knew how to read my family members' facial expressions even when I was standing some distance away from them, it just wasn't important. There was no good reason not to just stand up and walk over to the calendar on my bedroom wall when I wanted to read what was written on it.

A few years later, when I was in college and probably about 20 or 21 years old, pretty much the exact same thing happened again. I lived with my parents throughout college, so I woke up one day in exactly the same bed and found that a slightly different calendar hanging in probably exactly the same place on the same wall opposite my bed was again too difficult to read. My mother took me in again, and again the optometrist said that my eyes hadn't really changed enough for me to really need a new prescription, but that since I had noticed the change, he would go ahead and give me a new prescription. We went to LensCrafters or some similar such thing and looked at some frames, but large lenses were already going out of style by then, and I hated all the frames with smaller lenses. My mother tried to persuade me that I should really get a second pair of frames so that I would have a backup pair in case one broke, but I refused to accept any of the frames they were selling and just had the new lenses put into my original frames.

Well, now I'm 35, and I hadn't been back to an eye doctor since. I still have just the single original frames, on which the purple facing with black dots has now worn away so thoroughly that Susan had no idea the frames had ever been anything other than plain brass. I know I should have gone back long, long ago. It's just that things kept coming up. I had a job with health insurance from ages 22 to 27, but my vision never seemed to get any worse, and I figured that since I had always noticed even very slight changes in my vision before, the fact that I hadn't noticed any changes in my vision since age 20 was a pretty good sign that the need to get my eyes checked was not yet urgent. I always planned to get around to it eventually, but I always figured it wouldn't hurt to wait one more year.

And then, six days after I turned 28, I got laid off. Six months later I found a new job, but the new job didn't include health insurance. I was nearly 31 by the time I got health insurance again. By then I certainly intended to get my eyes checked. But I also needed to get a lot of other health-related appointments taken care of, because I hadn't been to a doctor of any kind in nearly three years. And because I still hadn't noticed my vision getting even the tiniest bit worse in all those years, seeing an eye doctor was still one of the lower priorities among the various medical appointments I needed to make.

At age 32, I got laid off again. And I still hadn't gotten around to getting my eyes checked.

Well, that layoff happened in the midst of the Great Recession of Late 2008/Early 2009, so it took me until age 34 to find a steady job again at all, and it took me until age 35 to get health insurance again. I got the health insurance on the last day of last August. I spent September adapting to new job duties, October working a gradually greater and greater number of hours, and November and December working 60 or more hours per week. Now it's January, and I finally found time to make an appointment with an optometrist.

It seems that the entire concept of getting one's eyes checked has changed rather dramatically in fifteen years. Fifteen years ago, getting my eyes checked consisted of reading the letters on an eye chart and then reading them again while various different lenses were placed in front of each of my eyes. This time it was considerably more traumatic. They started out by telling me, "Sit down in front of these three machines. Don't worry, they won't hurt - they just surprise you." Huh? What will surprise me? It was an ominous warning, and I had absolutely no idea what these bizarre machines might do to "surprise" me. After about fifteen minutes of taking my family history (yes, I have many, many, many close relatives who have gone blind from pretty much every possible eye disease including glaucoma, macular degeneration, and cataracts) and five minutes of fiddling around telling me to look at various lights inside one of the machines that was apparently going to "surprise" me at any moment, the woman operating the machines got around to mentioning that the "surprise" was going to consist of a puff of air being blown into my eye. This sounded quite off-putting, but I guess it was good that she eventually got around to mentioning it before actually subjecting me to it. When she did subject me to it, I clutched my eye in shock because it was even more unpleasant than I had imagined. I also apparently jumped back so quickly that it didn't actually work.

After she had subjected me to the unpleasant puff of air a second time in that eye and once in the other eye, we moved on to a much less unpleasant machine in which I got to look at a picture of a barn while she made it go in and out of focus. The only disconcerting thing about this one was the fact that I supposed this must be the new way of fitting me for new lenses and expected her to ask me to tell her when the barn came into perfect focus. When she put the barn way out of focus and stopped there, leaving it way out of focus, I feared that there had been some sort of terrible mistake and she was going to give me a prescription for new glasses that would make everything look horribly out of focus all the time like the way the picture of the barn had ended up.

She then described the third machine in a way that made it sound similarly untraumatic. "Look at the green light," she said. "When I push this, the green light will change to a big purple light. It's just going to turn purple, that's all. Well, and then it turns blue and red and yellow. But first it'll just be all purple." That sounded actually rather pleasant. I like purple! I'll be happy to look at a purple light. She neglected to mention that actually the "big purple light" was a blindingly bright purple flash, and that the light itself did not actually turn blue and red and yellow at all; instead, the afterimage burned into my retina turned blue and red and yellow while I sat with my eyelids fully closed, wondering whether I would ever be able to see again. And then we repeated the whole process on the other eye, while I wondered why in the world I was allowing a lunatic to blind me in both eyes.

After that I went out to sit in the waiting room for a few minutes, where the woman who had just finished blinding me emerged from a doorway just in time to overhear me explaining to Susan that yes, I did vaguely remember hearing her complain about how unpleasant it was to get her eyes checked, but that I'd always just assumed that the unpleasant tests she talked about were only for . . . well, for "people who are older than I am." The woman who had just subjected me to the unpleasant tests laughed heartily at that.

Then I got called back for the more familiar form of eye exam, in which I got to read a bunch of different-sized letters on a screen while looking through a bunch of different lenses. A different woman did this part of the exam. As the process continued, she seemed kind of surprised by the results. At one point she made the letters almost microscopically tiny, so I couldn't really be sure what any of them were, but I tried my best to guess at them. "Wow!" she exclaimed. Apparently I got at least most of them right. Shortly after that, seeming more confused than ever by the results, she put aside the machines entirely and simply fished an old laminated piece of paper out of her desk and placed it in my hand, which was on my lap. The paper had paragraphs of text, complete sentences and all, with the fonts gradually increasing in size from the top to the bottom of the page. "Can you read the small print on that?" she asked. "Yes," I said. I did not have my glasses on, but even the smallest print size on this piece of paper was perfectly easy to read. I've never needed my glasses for reading. In fact, by this point she had already asked me whether I wore my glasses all the time, and I had explained that I only wear my glasses when I leave the house, never when I'm at home, and I had also specified that I never wear my glasses when reading, so I was confused about why she was even asking me whether I could read a page of small print without my glasses. Of course I could; it was much easier to read than some of the small print she had asked me to guess at through the various lenses.

"Have you noticed any eye strain when you try to read or look at things up close with your glasses on?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "that's why I don't wear my glasses when I read. That's why I never wear my glasses at all when I'm home."

"Well, I can see why you're feeling eye strain," she said. "Your prescription is about twice as strong as what you need. If you keep trying to read with these glasses, you'll probably need bifocals earlier than you should. Usually most people don't need bifocals until they're 40, and I think that if we get you some glasses that aren't so strong, we can put that off a while longer."

Back when I worked in an office, I did actually experience some rather uncomfortable eye strain from sitting at a computer all day with my glasses on. During the last year or so before I got laid off, I occasionally even took my glasses off for a few minutes in my cubicle and noticed that it was much more comfortable for me to focus on the screen without my glasses. But I was never comfortable leaving my glasses off for very long in the office, because everyone was used to seeing me with them on, and I was clearly too young to need bifocals, so I wasn't sure how I'd be able to answer any awkward questions about why I had taken my glasses off. But ever since I got laid off in January 2009, I've worked at home all the time, so I've never worn my glasses during working hours. I haven't ever attempted to read a book or a computer screen with my glasses on during the three years since then. In fact, since I only ever leave the house for maybe about three or four hours per week these days, to go grocery shopping and such, I've only been wearing my glasses for about three or four hours per week. Prior to being laid off, I wore my glasses for about forty hours per week, because I left my apartment for about forty hours per week. (Within a week or two of when I started to date Susan, I made it a policy that I also never wore my glasses when I was in her home - because that was home-like too, and there was only one person there to explain my odd glasses policy to, and the eye strain was too annoying for me to want to just keep wearing them for long.)

So anyway, it seems that I can see! Twice as well as I thought I could, even! And my vision was never really that bad in the first place, even when it was twice as bad as it is now. Soon I will have new, weaker lenses and even new frames, although I still resent the fact that none of the frames now available have as large of lenses as my original frames.

Mood: pleased

2011 Gardening Retrospective

This has been a freakishly dry winter so far. At this time last year, I'd already spent a month draining the back yard with a sump pump every single weekend just to keep any portion of it at all above the water line, and I would continue draining it with the sump pump every single weekend until well into March. This year, not only have I not had to use the sump pump even once, but we haven't even had a single rainstorm big enough to fill the ditch in the main part of the back yard.

Our ditch is divided into two unconnected sections: one part begins under the downspout and runs through the side yard, occasionally (when very, very full) draining slightly into the sideyard of the apartment complex next door, while the other part runs diagonally across the main part of our back yard and never drains anywhere whatsoever. The ditch under the downspout instantly fills up every time we get even the slightest sprinkling of rain. The ditch through the middle of the yard fills up anytime we get a moderate-sized rainstorm, which hasn't happened yet this winter. And the whole entire yard fills up anytime we get a heavy rainstorm or a succession of moderate-sized rainstorms within a week or two of one another, which happened continuously for all of last winter.

Anyway, this winter has been freakishly dry. And I'm mostly happy about that, because I don't really enjoy supervising the sump pump. However, I selected the plants for the back yard with specific weather conditions in mind, and this winter has been a very drastic departure from those conditions, so the plants are not entirely happy right now. The main plant species that is complaining is the clustered field sedge (Carex praegracilis), which spent the first eight months of 2011 spreading rapidly and filling in beautifully, only to spend the next four months turning browner and browner and browner. I can only hope that there are enough roots left alive for it to spring back fairly quickly when the rain shows up. And yes, I have in fact tried watering the plants, even though it feels way beyond absurd to be watering anything in the winter in this yard. But I've been afraid to water all that much for fear that I'll get stuck pumping all the water out of the yard with the sump pump the following weekend, and the little bit that I have watered has not seemed to produce any sign of improved health in the clustered field sedge.

Now, here are the annual before and after photos. Here is my garden at the end of December 2010:




And here it is today:




And here is last year's pair of photos, which showed a more dramatic improvement.

I had much larger and denser growth of annual wildflower seedlings last year than this year; this has caused reduced greenness in the lower right section of the picture. I scattered just as many seeds this year; I think the seedlings just haven't grown as much due to the lack of rain. I also lost three shrubs this year - the ocean spray near the house on the left, the elderberry near the fence right in the middle, and the coffeeberry near the fence on the right. All of them drowned in last winter's floods. However, the buttonbush and the red-twig dogwood, both located near the fence on the right side of the photos, have grown quite a bit and are starting to make a stronger visual impression. I'm happy with the way the shrubs I have are doing, but I'd like to fill in a few more gaps by planting more shrubs. I will probably need to use some additional shrubs of the same species I already have, because other species have not been working out very well.

My four goals for the garden in 2011 were:

1. Cover up more of the bare mud with plants. I covered up a whole lot of the bare mud with clustered field sedge, although this achievement is made less impressive by the clustered field sedge's unexpected brownness at the moment. But look how thoroughly the left bank of the ditch is covered with plants, though, compared to all the bare spots that were there a year ago.
2. Get the annual bluegrass under control. I have not been seeing anywhere near as many annual bluegrass seedlings this winter as I did last winter.
3. Continue defining clearer walking paths. I've made virtually no progress at all on this one, largely because the yard is so small that I hate to sacrifice any potential growing area for the sake of a path.
4. Persuade some mulch to remain on top of the ground or have some sort of discernible lasting effect on the soil. I've made huge strides in this area, although you might not know it from the photos. There are assorted sticks on the ground in the foreground of last year's photo, but they were only there because I'd just put them there within the past couple of days; by the end of the week they were sucked down into the mud. There are assorted sticks on the ground in the foreground of this year's photo as well, but those have been there for a couple of months without vanishing. Of course, this dramatic change in the behavior of the soil probably owes a whole lot to the freakishly dry winter. Still, I think that at least some small portion of the improvement is due to actual improvements in the soil itself. There are large areas of the yard now where, if I dig down a few inches, I can see that I'm digging predominantly through old compost, not the original clay.

My four goals for the garden in 2012 are:

1. Cover up more of the bare mud with plants, especially on the right side of the ditch.
2. Plant more shrubs.
3. Define clearer walking paths, especially on the right side of the ditch.
4. Eat more plants (i.e., give them to Susan and see if she can combine them with other foods to create something that tastes good).

( plant lists, of little interest to anyone other than me )

Mood: accomplished

Christmas Loot

For Christmas I received the following books:

• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (from my brother)
• The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (from my parents)
• Complete Pebble Mosaic Handbook by Maggie Howarth (from my parents)
• Firescaping: Creating Fire-Resistant Landscapes, Gardens, and Properties in California's Diverse Environments by Douglas Kent (from my parents)
• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer (from my parents)
• Concrete Garden Projects: Easy & Inexpensive Containers, Furniture, Water Features & More by Malin Nilsson and Camilla Arvidsson (from my parents)
• I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual by Pierre Seel (from my parents)
• An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society by Jennifer Terry (from my parents)

I also received the following:

• a new winter coat (from Susan)
• socks (from Susan)
• a trowel (from Susan)
• gardening gloves (from Susan)
• a magnifying glass (from Susan)
• an ice cream scoop (from Susan)
• a laser printer (for both of us from Santa Claus)
• a potlifter (from Susan's sister Wendy)
• a Gorillapod tripod (from my parents)
• a collapsible canvas dog crate (from my parents)
• liquid frisket for watercolor painting (from my parents)
• Collapse into Now by R.E.M. (from my parents)
• seeds of yellow lupine (Lupinus densiflorus) and tidy-tips (Layia platyglossa) (from my parents)
• a Christmas tree ornament with Susan's and my names on it (for both of us from Susan's sister Wendy)
• a Christmas tree ornament in the shape of a Zuni bear fetish (for both of us from my Aunt Kitty)
• many boxes of chocolates (for both of us from my Aunt Kitty, Susan's Aunt Laurie and Uncle John, and our former neighbor Jessica, and for me from Susan)

It was a good Christmas. I hope yours was too!

Mood: loved

December Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

It's Bloom Day again! The challenge of finding plants that are blooming right now is not nearly as difficult as the challenge of finding a few minutes to write about them when I'm still working 60-hour weeks. But here goes.

All the distance shots I have this month are actually from the end of November, because the yard looked better then. At the end of November, the red-twig dogwood (Cornus sericea) had bright red leaves, and the the buttonbush right behind it had bright green leaves. Now they both have no leaves. In fact, the monotony of the fence line is completely uninterrupted, because there's no longer a single plant in the back yard that is more than two feet tall and still has leaves on it. December is really not a good month for gardening in small yards. In a big yard where the fences aren't so oppressively close, a gardener might be able to focus on the plants and appreciate this stage of their life cycle. In a small yard, what little is left of the plants is completely overwhelmed by FENCE FENCE FENCE everywhere you look.




But I do have close-up shots from the past day or two. And yes, there are even some flowers blooming.

( Flowers blooming! )

Mood: tired

November Garden Blogger's Bloom-and-Foliage Day

Shall I call it that, or shall I go for the equally appropriate alternative: Garden Blogger Rises from the Dead Day? There are more flowers blooming in the yard right now than the ones I'm going to show you. I just didn't get around to photographing the others because I've been busy working 12-hour days, 13-hour days, 14-hour days, 15-hour days . . . and 16-hour days. But now there is a pause in the endless volume of work. It will definitely be all too brief a pause, but at least it happened at the right time to allow me to celebrate Bloom Day. Sort of. With an incomplete set of pictures of the current blooms.

Here is the California fuchsia (Epilobium canum 'Calistoga'), which has been lighting up the front sidewalk garden since early September.



( More blooms and pretty foliage! New plants, too! )

Mood: stressed

Happy Halloween!

This is our third annual math-o-lantern. The full equation on this one is 3x + 1 = 13. You can't see the 3, but you can see its ghost in the light shining on the wall.




A group of kids stopped Susan in the street this afternoon, a little before the trick-or-treating started. "You're not going to make us do math again, are you?" one of them asked her. "Yes, I am," Susan replied. The other kids turned to stare at the first kid. "She doesn't actually make you do math, does she?" they demanded. Yes, she does! I grow the pumpkins and carve them; Susan makes the kids do the math. And they actually get excited about it, because they get extra candy if they do the math. Then they go running down the street screaming excitedly that they got the right answer, and other kids come running up the street screaming excitedly that they want to do the math problem too.

Susan says our oldest trick-or-treaters tonight were two who were about 60 years old and had no children with them. There were two of them, sort of together, although they didn't particularly talk to each other, and they approached the door in rapid succession but not quite simultaneously. The man approached first. He was dressed as a hobo, complete with a real grey mustache and chin stubble. "I need more than one piece of candy," he announced, "because I have more than one grandkid." Susan was too flabbergasted by his age to make him do the math problem. He took some candy and wandered off, muttering under his breath, "Yeah, the grandkids are home sick. They have fevers. They're really sick."

Then the woman approached. She had a bluish green sheet draped over one shoulder and pinned around herself like a toga, with a low-cut neckline exposing stretched and wrinkled tattoos across her chest and upper arms. She was carrying a chihuahua under one arm. Susan remained too flabbergasted by the age of these people to make her do the math problem, so the woman just helped herself to some candy and started walking away. Then she turned around and announced in an offended-sounding tone, "Hey, you didn't ask me about my costume. I'm the Statue of Liberty. Can you tell?" She had no crown or torch, just the chihuahua. Susan wondered whether the chihuahua was supposed to be the torch, but she decided not to ask.

We had fewer scary adults unable to solve the math problem this year than in previous years, so I guess basic algebra/pre-algebra is easier for most people than long division or adding fractions (which we used on our pumpkins in 2009 and 2010, respectively). Or maybe it was just that our two scariest adults this year were so scary that Susan didn't even ask them to do the math.

Mood: pleased

Garden Bloggers' Wildlife Day, October Edition

It's time for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day again, but I still don't have much blooming. That's not to say that the garden is looking bad; the clustered field sedge and turkey-tangle fogfruit have certainly filled in quite a bit since last year. Of course, three of the shrubs in that picture from October 2010 are dead now (the blue elderberry, the coffeeberry, and the ocean spray), but on the whole, I think this October looks better than last October did.



( Only a few more pictures this time . . . )

Mood: busy

September Garden Bloggers' Wildlife Day

I'm several days late for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, and I don't even have that many blooms. This is not to say that September is a slow month in the garden, however. On the contrary, September seems to be the very best month of the entire year for wildlife in the garden - just not such a big month for the flowers. And now I'm finally going to get around to showing you both the wildlife and the flowers.

There's no wildlife visible in this first picture, but you can see most of the flowers: pale purplish California asters (Symphyotrichum chilense) in the lower left, the omnipresent golden rosillas (Helenium puberulum) just above them, and the last lingering yellow evening-primroses (Oenothera elata) and red cardinalflowers (Lobelia cardinalis) mingling in the ditch. In the center, the clustered field sedge (Carex praegracilis) is forming a rather delightfully lush, unmowed, lawn-like area.



( Frogs! Toads! Butterflies! Birds! )

Mood: busy

August Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

I'm not sure that July and August entirely deserve separate Garden Bloggers' Bloom Days, because most of the yard looks almost identical today to the way it did a month ago, and most of the changes are for the worse. The plants continue to dry out over the long, rainless summer. The yarrow and the clustered field sedge (which are the primary groundcovers in the back yard) have both shrunken in size a bit due to lack of water, and in some areas the clustered field sedge has turned brown.

However, August is not entirely an inferior duplicate of July. I do have two rather spectacular new blooms in August - one in the back yard and one in the front. This picture shows the back yard one, cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), blooming in the ditch, surrounded by Hooker's evening-primroses (Oenothera hookeri) that are on higher ground, with rosillas (Helenium puberulum) and hairy gumplant (Grindelia hirsutula) seedheads in the background.

As you might guess from its appearance, the cardinal flower is a big hit with hummingbirds. Although I haven't managed to get any photos of the hummingbirds so far, the quantity and quality of hummingbird sightings in our yard have both vastly increased since the cardinal flower started blooming. Once, unfortunately without my camera, I stood about four feet from the cardinal flower while a hummingbird sipped from each individual flower at its stalk, one at a time, then tried a few of the evening-primrose flowers, circled around within two feet of my head so I could easily have reached out and touched it, repeatedly landed on the oleanders about four feet above my head, and even came back for a second visit to the cardinal flower a few minutes later. Before the cardinal flower bloomed, I had only ever seen hummingbirds make a quick dash through our yard and be gone in under ten seconds.



( More beautiful August flowers! )

Mood: accomplished

Thirty-Five

Usually I make a LiveJournal entry on my birthday to record the presents I received. Well, my birthday was four days ago now and I haven't done that yet . . . partly because I hadn't actually received presents from anyone but Susan until yesterday. And also because on the evening of my actual birthday, I was rather distracted and unable to focus on birthday sentiments because Susan broke a tooth during dinner that evening. But I guess things have settled down a bit now, and the birthday loot-collecting is over, so here is what I received. From Susan, I received garden clippers, a saw, a waterproof and fire-resistant safe, two books (Octavia Butler's Blood Child and Amy Bloom's Where the God of Love Hangs Out), and four seed packets (arroyo lupine, mountain garland, bird's eye gilia, and blue flax). From my brother, I received Pippi Longstocking, the book (no, I never read it as a kid). From my parents, I received two works of fiction (H. G. Adler's The Journey, Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and The Arabian Nights), four works of garden-related nonfiction (the USDA's Common Weeds of the United States, Rosemary Alexander's The Essential Garden Design Workbook, Nancy Ondra's and Saxon Holt's Grasses: Versatile Partners for Uncommon Garden Design, and Janet Macunovich's Designing Your Gardens and Landscapes - that last one being one that my parents already owned and spontaneously offered to me), one style manual for use at my workplace (the latest edition of William A. Sabin's The Gregg Reference Manual and the last one to be completed by William A. Sabin, who died before it was published), five seed packets (tall evening-primrose, globe gilia, baby blue eyes, tufted poppies, and mixed-color California poppies), and a bacterial mosquito-control product called "Mosquito Bits." And also from my parents, a card I liked very much, which says, "Once upon a time you were born . . . and there was much rejoicing, for in one instant the world had become a more beautiful and magical place. Happy Birthday."

So now I'm thirty-five. And things are just right in my personal life, pretty good in my professional life, and only really significantly wrong in two ways: first, Susan and I need to be allowed to get married, and second, we need to buy a house. Of course there are lots of shorter-term wrongnesses, such as the need to get Susan's tooth fixed (she has an appointment soon), but those two are going to take the longest to resolve. The marriage one is largely beyond our control. The house-buying one is much less so, but it will be a lot of work. We need to see a financial advisor to determine how to most equitably divide the mortgage responsibilities (because I'm the one with the money saved for a down payment, and she's the one with a slightly larger income), and we need to develop a budget that will give us a clearer idea of how much we want to spend, and we need to mentally prepare ourselves for dealing with pressure from real estate agents to spend more than the houses are worth, and we need to go around actually looking at houses, and then, assuming we find one, we will probably need to install a fence and/or a few other basic necessities that many houses around here don't have but that we can't do without for any length of time, and then we will need to actually move. I'm not sure we can handle all of that in the coming year, but we should strive to at least make some significant progress on it.

We both like the idea of living out of town, where the lots are larger and hillier and wilder, but we are both concerned about some of the repercussions associated with that. I telecommute daily for my job, so it is extremely important to have a completely reliable Internet connection, but cable is not available out of town, and we're not sure whether or not a DSL or satellite connection would be reliable enough. Sewer service is also not widely available out of town, and we're not thrilled at the idea of having a septic tank. And on a gardening-related note, out-of-town lots are generally located in the foothills and therefore are generally either covered with poison oak or cursed by serpentine soil. I'm more inclined toward the serpentine soil, because poison oak can't grow in serpentine soil, and I really do not care for the idea of having to weed poison oak out of my garden. I know that many people manage it - my own parents have removed massive amounts of poison oak from their yard - but I am not "many people"; I am me, and my willingness to deal with poison oak is not very high at all. Particularly considering that even after all the efforts my parents have made to remove it from their yard, I know that they still have new seedlings coming up all the time that have to be continually removed - I just hate the idea of not being able to garden in our own yard without worrying that I might at any moment accidentally kneel on a tiny poison oak seedling and have to spend the next week or two desperately regretting it. Besides, Susan is ultra-susceptible to allergic skin reactions to plants of far more innocuous types; I'd hate to see how she might react to poison oak.

However, it's not easy to determine which areas have sufficiently strong serpentine soil to prevent poison oak. And if we do manage to find one, will I be able to garden in it? It seems like I should have a decent chance; hardly any non-native plants can grow in serpentine soil, but I'm a native plant gardener, and there are some native plants that can grow in serpentine soil. Not a whole lot, but then, there aren't a whole lot of native plants that can grow in the vernal pool-like conditions of our current yard, either, and I'm managing to garden here reasonably well. Still! If we buy a house on serpentine soil, the plants I'm currently growing that I would still be able to grow would be: hairy gumplant, Hartweg's doll's lily, Sonoma sage, and . . . uh, that's about it. I would probably never be able to grow any trees at all other than leather oaks, tanoaks, gray pines, incense cedars, MacNab's cypress, and whiteleaf manzanita. I could never grow a valley oak, a maple, a buckeye, a madrone, a redbud, a dogwood, an ash, a walnut, a sycamore, a cottonwood, a cherry, a plum, a fir or a Douglas-fir, a hop tree, a willow, a yew, a bay, a Ponderosa pine . . . that's an awful lot to give up the ability to grow in a place where I hope to live at least the majority of the rest of my life. And that's just the trees I'd be giving up; there are also the shrubs, perennials, and annuals I'd be giving up. Of course, I'd also be giving up a large portion of the need to weed, because hardly any weeds would be able to grow either. But a gardener needs some variety of plants to choose from.

These are the things we care most about: a decent-sized lot (at least a third of an acre), a reliable Internet connection, a gas stove for Susan to cook on (or the ability to install one for a reasonable price), a decent-sized kitchen (preferably with a window over the kitchen sink), a fence to keep the dogs in (or the money left over to have one built), central air conditioning to make the summers survivable (or the money left over to have it installed), the absence of poison oak, soil that I can plant stuff in (especially trees - yards require shade to become truly usable), space enough for a ton of bookshelves but not too much to keep air-conditioned (around 1,400 square feet minimum and not much more than 2,000 square feet maximum), and a house that's reasonably pleasant-looking both inside and out or can be made so without inordinate expense. I'm especially (perhaps excessively) drawn to two-story houses with decks, such as this Penn Valley house, and to anything that abuts a natural wetlands, such as this Loma Rica house, but I could also easily picture us in something like this Browns Valley house, which features neither of those advantages. Or if we chose to move in a completely different compass direction and stay firmly in the Sacramento Valley so as to avoid both the poison oak and serpentine soil of the foothills, we could live in something more like this Yuba City house, which is not at all bad either. So there are lots of choices; I just don't know which choices are the best choices, and the indecisive default option of staying where we live now is, uh, really unpleasant, and not even a very good financial decision either. So I hope we manage to figure out a lot of this stuff during the coming year.

Mood: contemplative

July Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Now that it's officially summer and nearly all the spring wildflowers are gone, I had expected my Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day posts to get significantly shorter. But it turns out that there are still plenty of summer flowers to show. I do think the front yard has slowed down noticeably, but the back yard seems to be even more covered with flowers than before. I'm sure this is due to some combination of the back yard being naturally wetter (too wet, really, for most of the spring wildflowers' tastes) and the back yard being the only one I water in the summer. I'm not really watering the whole back yard, but I'm refilling the ditch every few days to keep the water-loving plants in it happy, and I'm spot-watering under a few water-loving plants outside the ditch: the red-twig dogwood, the buttonbush, the scarlet monkeyflower, and occasionally the California polypody fern.

Anyway, the plants seem pretty happy. As you can see from the picture, July is turning out to be primarily the month of white yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and yellow Hooker's evening-primrose (Oenothera elata ssp. hookeri). There are also some yellow prairie coneflowers (Ratibida columnifera) at the lower right and some yellowish rosillas (Helenium puberulum) in the upper right - you can hardly see the flowers from here, but you can see the stems poking up in the upper left. You can also see little green tomato fruits in the ditch, front and center.

Frankly, some parts of the back yard are becoming rather frighteningly overgrown. It's hard to believe that this has happened only a couple of years after I despaired of ever being able to keep anything alive in the back yard at all. Of course, I still yearn to cover all that exposed dirt in the foreground of the picture. But the area just out of sight to the left of this picture is fast becoming an impassable jungle of yarrow, asters, rosilla, and evening-primroses. I'd trim it back, but how can I bring myself to do that when it's all either blooming or due to start blooming soon?



( More pictures! )

Mood: accomplished

June Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

That's right - it's time for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day again. The weather this month has been the most bizarrely un-Junelike of any June I can remember. It was nice in a way - 60 degrees Fahrenheit is really much more physically comfortable for me than our usual 100 degrees Fahrenheit - but it was also eerie, because I've lived in the Sacramento Valley for all the nearly 35 years of my life, and I know very well what June is supposed to feel like here, and this was definitely not it. The longer it lasted, the more eerie it felt, and it lasted long enough (several weeks, perhaps an entire month, since it affected part of May as well) that the mental discomfort started preventing me from appreciating the physical comfort. Climate change is not just coming in the future, people. Climate change is already here in quite a big way. Alaska's weather got diverted to northern California this month, and I'm afraid to ask whose weather ended up in Alaska.

But Alaska's weather is going or gone from us now. It's 96 degrees outside right now, and that's the proper June weather I know so well. My photographs just won't reflect it, because I took most of them on cloudy days between rainstorms. See the muddy water in the ditch in front of Boston? That's gone now. As wet as this yard gets in the winter, it only takes a few days of normal summer heat to dry it out. And now we have our normal summer heat.

The flowers in the picture are yellow seep monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus) in the foreground, hairy gumplant (Grindelia hirsutula) and rosilla (Helenium puberulum) just behind it, white yarrow (Achillea millefolium) farther back, and two different shades of mountain garland (Clarkia unguiculata) with California golden poppies (Eschscholzia californica) along the house.



( Lots of pictures! The pictures include some inappropriate language. You'll see what I mean soon enough. )

Mood: shocked

May Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

It's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day again, and my garden is putting on the final act of its spring wildflower show: the bright pink clarkias with the all-too-apt common name "farewell-to-spring." There are many more dead brown plants now than there were a month ago (most of the annuals are reaching the ends of their natural lifespans), and even the still-green perennial plants don't seem to be quite as bright and lively a shade of green as they were a month ago. On the other hand, there are more actual flowers in the back yard this month than there were last month. There are fewer flowers in the front yard this month than last month, but as you can see, it's still looking pretty fantastic for now. Just not for much longer.

I have two types of clarkia this year: the locally native mountain garland (Clarkia unguiculata) that I've grown in previous years and the more widely grown but not locally native farewell-to-spring (Clarkia amoena). The pink flowers you see in this picture are from both of those, while the yellow flowers are from Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum).



( Many more pictures! )

Mood: accomplished

April Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

It's time for April Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day! This will be a rather long post, because my garden generally peaks in either April or May, and I can't really tell which month it will peak in until May arrives. So I just spend April taking  a million pictures and hoping this is the right time to be taking them.

The front yard is looking every bit fantastic enough right now that it may well be at its peak. The back yard is a little more disappointing; although it doesn't have as much exposed dirt as it had at this time last year, it also doesn't seem to have many of the flowers it had last year. In particular, last June featured an amazing display of elegant clarkia in one corner of the back yard, but I don't think this coming June is going to repeat that, because hardly any clarkia seedlings in the back yard appear to have survived our wet winter.

But let's start in the front yard. I can tell that the front yard is looking fantastic even to people much less biased about it than Susan and me, because our newspaper carrier, who has been persistently smashing plants to death by tossing newspapers right on top of them every day of the year, finally noticed this month that there are flowers here and started bothering to toss the newspaper into less damaging locations, such as the driveway and the lawn. Also, one of our next-door neighbors confessed that she had never thought that my native species gardening would ever amount to anything, because "it just looked like weeds" until this month, but now she's impressed. Of course, she'll probably stop being impressed by July or August, when the flowers are mostly gone. But for now, everyone's a fan. (Including our new cat. As the only indoor-outdoor kitty of the household, Spider will probably do a lot of posing with my plants from now on.)



( Way too many pictures. )

Mood: accomplished

Susan Is Single! Susan Is Single! Susan Is Single!

HOORAY!!! It may sound odd for me to be cheering about my fiancee being single again, but in this case, I have good reason. Susan's domestic partnership with her ex whom she left in 2006 is FINALLY DISSOLVED!!! Only a completely ridiculous 32 and a half months after she paid the lawyer to file for dissolution. (For comparison, even extremely complicated divorce cases involving custody disputes generally take only 6 months, and nothing whatsoever was being disputed in this case. The lawyer was simply massively incompetent.)

I told Susan not to go thinking she's back on the market now. She's MINE.

P.S. And in other news, today is the 19th anniversary of the day I turned queer. Happy birthday, dear queerness! I fully intend to marry you off before you turn 21.

Mood: ecstatic

Electrical Explosions

We had rather an unplanned adventure today. Apparently a string of four electrical transformers on our street blew out, one at a time, over the course of the morning, starting small fires on front lawns all up and down the street, and shutting off power to half the neighborhood. We were among the last to suffer a power outage, but we had no idea that any of this was going on until our own power went out. It stayed out for about six hours. We're told that the electric company's initial estimates were that our power would remain out until Tuesday! Since I work from home, this would have prevented me from working. Actually, since I have been working 50 hours per week for months, I really needed to work a few hours today also, and this did prevent me from working. But it would have been even worse if I couldn't work until some point on Tuesday.

There were police cars and fire trucks directly in front of our house, and a yellow plastic banner blocking access to our street, and flames shooting from a lawn a few houses down from us. Some houses near the first transformer that blew out were evacuated, because the electric company was afraid that when they tried to turn it back on, it might actually blow up the houses. We didn't get evacuated, but even though our power is finally back on, there are still several trucks down the street working on the first transformer.

There was a run on ready-to-serve foods at our local grocery store, but Susan went there well before our usual dinner time and managed to get us some before they ran out. Half the people in the neighborhood gathered outside on their driveways, and our next-door neighbors, who know that we have fifty million books in our house, asked to borrow a bunch of children's books from Susan's shelf of them. Soon our driveway was filled with all the small children of the neighborhood, gathered in little circles while the teenage boys of the neighborhood, dressed in wannabe-gangster clothes and looking extremely out of place, yet with nothing else to do in the absence of electricity, read fairy tales to the smaller children from Susan's books. It was an odd sight.

Stardust and Spider spent some time bonding by hiding together under our bed to get away from the dogs. I spent some time digging out the Santa Barbara sedge in the back yard, because although it's a native and I paid good money for it several years ago, it had begun invading areas where I didn't want it, much like the rushes had, and I've decided that the only grasslike plants I want in the yard are the clustered field sedge, the alkali sacaton, the volunteer annual toad rushes, and the volunteer mystery grass that's probably alta fescue. Those four all look fantastic for at least half the year, which is enough for them to earn their keep.

I blame the fact that I've been working 50 hours per week, and also the fact that we've been integrating a new cat into the household, for my failure to come up with an April Fool's Day post yesterday. I thought of various ideas, but none of them seemed especially better than any of the others, and I didn't have the time or energy to develop one in enough detail to make it properly funny. So I let the day pass without telling you about how I planted the whole yard with native poison oak or invasive Chinese trees-of-heaven or converted the back yard to a koi pond or spotted the Loch Ness monster in the ditch in the back yard or quit my job to become a professional something-related-to-gardening. Next year I hope to do better, provided that I'm not still working 50 hours per week. I really don't mind working thus many hours for a month or two - the extra money is nice, especially after I spent so long unemployed - but I've currently been working 50 hours every week for more than three months - even when there's a holiday I skip the holiday and continue working 50 hours per week - and I'm going to have to continue doing this for at least two more months without any break at all, so it's been getting to me lately.

Mood: busy

Spider

Susan and I seem to have a new cat. We didn't choose him; he chose us. He started hanging around about four weeks ago and insisted on sitting on Susan's lap every time she sat on the bench on the front porch. After a week or so, the weather got really horrible (constant huge rainstorms for weeks), so she opened our garage door about six inches to give him the option of coming in out of the storm. She also gave him some food at that time, and she says that he ate as if he hadn't had any food in weeks. As far as we can tell, he has never voluntarily left our property in the three weeks since then. He only seems to leave the garage for bathroom purposes and to sit on Susan's lap whenever she's on the front porch bench. He appears to spend every single moment of every single day day sleeping on the cat bed we provided for him in the garage, other than when we let him in the house (which requires very close supervision right now, partly because Boston wants to eat him, and partly because he wants to use the fireplace as a litterbox).

We put a collar on him a week ago, and I named him Spider. Susan has been telling people we named him that because he's been hanging out in the garage, which is full of spiders, but do not believe her for one moment, because I am the one who suggested the name, and the real reason I named him Spider is to match Stardust's name, because of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

I gave Spider a Frontline treatment last weekend, although as far as we could tell, he didn't seem to have any fleas. Susan thinks that whoever owned him before has moved away and abandoned him, because that is apparently common in this neighborhood. Anyway, no one has removed the collar that we put on him, so today Susan took him to the vet. The vet checked him for a microchip and did not find one, so we figure he's now officially ours. The vet also verified that Spider does not have FIV or feline leukemia virus or any other evident illnesses. (I had been a bit concerned about his health, because he so rarely leaves his cat bed. He is a young cat and has not yet been neutered - he has an appointment for that a month from now - so it is a little odd for him not to wander the neighborhood.) The vet estimates that he is about one year old, and recommends that we let him be an indoor-outdoor kitty, because he is a bit old at this point to adjust well to being indoor-only. It would probably be inevitable anyway that he would go outdoors, because we have a pet door for the dogs to go out through, and there's no way to stop Spider from also using it if he chooses to. (Stardust is strictly indoor-only, but that's because I trained her to it from the time she was a tiny kitten, and now she's absolutely terrified of the outdoors and howls like she's being murdered if I try to take her out there.)

The vet laughed at Susan for bringing Spider in a bright pink cat carrier that I bought for Stardust, because the bright pink cat carrier is very not Spider's style and also very not Susan's style either. It is clear that our cats are going to be quite gender-stereotypical, with all of Stardust's possessions being fit for a drag queen and all of Spider's possessions needing to be more butch. I think this is acceptable, however, due to the fact that our male dog (Ganymede) is nowhere near as butch as our female dog (Boston). The reason I take so many more pictures of Boston in the garden than of Ganymede is that Boston always follows me into the garden, because she likes to play in the mud and catch weeds in her mouth when I throw them for her. Ganymede, on the other hand, could not catch anything whatsoever even if his life depended on it, and he doesn't like to go in the yard because the yard is muddy and mud is icky and he doesn't want to get any of it on his toes.

Anyway, Spider is extremely friendly and wants to sit on our laps at all times. This is very unlike Stardust, who never wants to sit on anyone's lap and won't even let Susan pet her or touch her at all - despite immense effort on Susan's part to win Stardust's heart through bribery and hand-feeding of lawn grass, which is the only type of food Stardust shows any real excitement about. It is good that Susan will finally have a cat who shows affection for her instead of total disdain, and it is good that both of us will have a cat who is not autistic or a paranoid schizophrenic. (Stardust is definitely at least one of those things and quite possibly both. She is a totally adorable kitty and can be very affectionate with me in her own way, but no one could ever accuse her of being socially or psychologically well-adjusted.)

Spider is smaller than Stardust, and whereas Stardust makes extremely high-pitched squeaks rather than proper meows, Spider makes sort of hoarse meows that are lower-pitched than those of most cats. Neither one of them sounds like a normal cat, although I suppose Spider sounds a little closer to a normal cat than Stardust does. Stardust's initial reaction to Spider was to hiss and growl, while Spider made no response, but now they have made enough progress that they can coexist peacefully on opposite sides of the same room. They have never come right up to each other yet, but Stardust watched Spider climb halfway up her cat tree, and she allowed this and did not growl or hiss to warn him away from it.

Boston, as I mentioned earlier, is still acting like she thinks Spider is food. We have to restrain her anytime Spider moves. But Boston will get over this eventually; she got over it with Stardust. Ganymede does not have much hunting instinct compared to Boston, so he doesn't need to be restrained so firmly; he mostly just needs us to tell him to back off occasionally if he gets too close to Spider.



Mood: excited

March Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Spring is here! Spring is finally here! Every single other California garden blogger that I know of had clear signs of spring on last month's Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, but I'm farther north than any of them, so I had no spring yet. Now I have spring!

The first of the baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii) in our back yard opened on February 19. However, it only lasted a few days before the dogs trampled on it and broke the flower off. The next one opened around the end of February, also in the back yard, but that one was only an inch tall - the width of the flower was equal to the height and width of the entire plant - so it also only lasted a few days before a huge rainstorm submerged it entirely underwater and washed all the petals away. It wasn't until March 9 that we had multiple spring-blooming flowers open at once - a whole bunch of baby blue eyes and some arroyo lupine along the front sidewalk, and a few more baby blue eyes in the back yard. They all opened over the course of that morning, and now spring has really gotten started, with a continuous supply of flowers that should last for months.

Here are a flower and a bud of the baby blue eyes in the front yard, poking through the leaves of the arroyo lupine.



( Spring is here! Spring is here! Click for more photos. )

Mood: accomplished

Bok Kai Parade

Last weekend, Susan and I went to the Marysville Bok Kai Parade, an annual tradition dating back to at least 1880, and probably to the 1850s; it is considered California's oldest annual parade. The tradition was established by the residents of the local Chinatown, and although the Chinatown pretty much ceased to exist when mobs of white residents drove all the Chinese people out of the city in February 1886 (the same time that similar mobs were driving Chinese people out of other cities throughout much of California), somehow the parade itself continued. A few old Chinese buildings also remain, and some Chinese people from Sacramento and other cities come to town for the day of the parade, but Marysville's year-round population of Chinese descent is almost nonexistent. (A friend I went to high school with believes that her grandparents, who are Chinese and live in Marysville, are Marysville's only Chinese residents.)

This year was the second time that Susan and I attended the parade. The first time we attended was in 2009, when we were enthralled by the bizarre historical inaccuracies of floats that showed Donner Party survivors accompanied by Chinese coolies. (Marysville is named after a Donner Party survivor, Mary Murphy Covillaud, whose husband owned most of the town at one point.) We skipped last year's parade, because we were afraid it couldn't possibly live up to the previous one. This year, we worked up the courage to go again.



( Tons of pictures! )

Mood: pleased

The Importance of Good Grammar

Being a professional editor, I can never resist a story about the importance of good grammar. sammka's latest entry is an excellent example, so I have to share it with you. You see, sammka actually bothered to read the text of a South Dakota bill (apparently aimed at undermining abortion rights) carefully - while the South Dakota legislators clearly didn't. Here is the crucial sentence from the bill:

Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is. [my emphasis; original underlining removed]

And here is sammka's response to it:

DANGLING CLAUSE ALERT. Because this is the third "or" clause in the sentence, you THINK it's supposed to be parallel to the others, but that makes no frigging sense: "Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is." WTF.

After like 20 minutes, I figured out that the final "or" clause was actually supposed to be nested into the penultimate "or" clause: "Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt . . . to commit any felony upon any dwelling house in which such person is, or to commit any felony in any dwelling house in which such person is."

Which, by the way, is WAY SCARIER than a law saying that you can use lethal force in defense of your own fetus. I can totally shoot someone who's attempting to commit ANY FELONY in any house where I am. If this is to be taken literally, if I go to someone ELSE's house in South Dakota and they try to deal drugs or commit securities fraud or whatever in front of me, I CAN KILL THEM IN COLD BLOOD.

I'm pretty sure that's not what the South Dakota legislature meant to say. They probably missed it because the sentence overall is completely unreadable! Learn to write more clearly, South Dakota! You really need to work on your comma usage.

Mood: approving