speaking of gardening, ben yancer

mine is completely out of control. notes to self:

1. next year, plant the tomatoes next to a fence or wall so that they can lean onto it and not completely overshadow the peppers. my attempt at staking did not turn out well.

2. cucumbers must be on a trellis. not only do they stay out of the way, they also produce more and better fruit than those trailing on the ground. the ones on the ground also tend to get a strange disease on them (gummosis, says my book) and dry rot. (and remember in The Book, ben, you can make an inclined trellis for your cucumbers and plant shade-loving vegetables underneath it.)

3. winter squash (buttercup, in my case) must have its own bed far away from all others with miles to roam. because it was fenced in the beginning (we finally took it down) it wended its way through and around ALL of the other vegetables, even those at the far opposite end from it.

4. plant less squash.

5. plant more beets.

those are my thoughts for next year's garden. for now i keep busy picking and pickling cucumbers, and keeping the yellow squash picked and eaten. we also have a few ripening tomatoes. the peas are about ready, but there aren't enough to pick a lot all at once to cook with so i just eat them right off of the vine.

and speaking of pickling, here is a list of my accomplishments so far:

7 pints of bread-and-butter pickles
3 pints of yellow cucumber relish
7 quarts and 1 pint of yellow cucumber pickles
7 pints and 1 quart of dill pickles

i haven't tried any yet so i don't have any idea how they taste or even if i did things correctly, but i guess time will tell. i hope i have enough tomatoes to can. i'd love to make some salsa and stewed tomatoes, and maybe ketchup. for that reason, next year i am going to plant an insane amount of tomato plants so i will have plenty of excess to work with.

how is yours coming, ben? or anyone else, for that matter.

quitter, part 1

God help me, I am a quitter.

i quit the nursing program at Union because i wasn't sure it was what i really wanted to do. or was i just afraid that it would be too difficult and i would fail?

more recently i had planned to go back to school for my doctorate of physical therapy, but before i even started i changed to nursing because it would be quicker and less expensive. or did i think the physical therapy program would be too challenging?

i started my new job this week as a cna. i'm still in orientation and i want to quit already--not only my cna job but also the nursing program, which i'm not even officially accepted into yet. i'm not afraid that i'll be a bad cna; i want to quit because i know i won't like it and i'm afraid i won't like nursing. i just want a job where i can hide away and work by myself. accounting, maybe?

earlier this summer i considered switching my focus to accounting. i figured it would be a cut and dry field--you put the numbers in one end and they come out the other. when i told my brother that he countered my theory, saying that there was a lot of independent and creative thinking involved. oh well, maybe it's not for me, i said. at that time i also told my friend mike (atwork) about my consideration and he wisely replied, "yeah, when there's not a strong pull in one direction it doesn't take much to swing the compass." that's the story of my life.

and i'm tired of it.

to be continued . . .

surprise

when was the last time this happened to you: you're sitting in your living room watching a movie over lunch when all at once you realize the noise you've been hearing outside isn't simply a passing tractor; it is, in fact, a helicopter that has just landed in your back yard?

this very thing happened to me today. i guess it's one of the perks of having a pilot for a husband. tim wasn't flying the helicopter (he wishes he could), but he was in it with a friend that used to work at the airport. apparently ed (that was the pilot's name) is working on his helicopter CFI (commercial flight instructor) and came to council bluffs to give rides to some family members, just to build up time. (you need 1,000 hours in order to get a job, he said.) so tim got a ride too, out to our house.

i was caught a bit off guard. once i realized what was going on i had to rush around putting on mascara and proper attire (i was cleaning out our upstairs) since i knew tim didn't fly helicopters so there would be a stranger outside as well. tim asked if ed could give me a quick ride, so ed flew me around our house a little bit. it was pretty neat, especially with no doors. then he landed, i hopped out, tim hopped in, and they were gone again.

that was my surprise for the day. pretty sweet, hey?

stormy weather

"it's rainin' all the time." rain rain rain rain rain. that's all it's been doing lately. as far as i can remember, it rained last saturday morning, early sunday morning, sunday afternoon, monday afternoon, and all morning tuesday from about 5:30a.m. to 12:30p.m. i don't mind the rain, really. the thunder and lightning are neat and the last couple of months have been pretty dry. but right now i need to work and i can't work when it rains, or for a couple of days afterwards. it reminds me of when i worked for world of green when rain days meant a day off--only then i looked forward to it.

i took a CNA class in july and now that i'm done i'm waiting for the job offers to roll in, except that they're not rolling in. the only offer i've gotten is in glenwood, which is fine, but i would have to work from 2:00-10:00pm, my least favorite shift. i told her thank you, but that i would hold off for now in hopes of getting a day job.

my other difficulty in starting a job (besides the lack of offers) is time off. we have a wedding on the weekend of the 20th for which we need friday off, and we are planning to go to north dakota over labor day, which means another weekend and monday off. i don't know if employers like you to start and then demand two long weekends within two weeks. here's where the rain days come in: i was hoping that the airport would have enough mowing to do in august to keep me busy and thus getting paid. when it rains, however, the grounds get saturated and stay that way for a couple of days, which means no work for me.

i'm getting the house organized somewhat in the meantime. that's a plus.

fireflies

klaralyn stopped by our little country house for an evening on her way through to new york a while back. she left about dusk and when i went out to tell her goodbye i looked out into the cornfield to the east and saw something wonderful: fireflies.

they were twinkling as far as you could see, thousands of them. the terraced cornfield looked like a green stadium with constant flashbulbs flickering at the celebrity cows across the fence. i had never before seen anything so beautiful.

after that night i tried to go outside every night at dusk in the hour after the sun set when it was dark enough to see the fireflies clearly but light enough to make out the surrounding landscape. sometimes tim and i would just stand and look, and look, and look, transfixed. it was hard to go inside. besides the cornfield stadium, our whole front yard was lit by little floating lanterns. i could have watched them for hours. it just amazes me that there are such things as fireflies. they look so magical they seem like something you would only see in a computer animated film, but there they are right in front of you. if the amount of magic in any given moment depends on how many little lightning bugs are lit in that moment, then our yard was truly an enchanted place. every second there must have been hundreds, and in the following second hundreds more. they just kept glowing.

i tried telling people they had to come out and see the fireflies while they were still in their prime, and while a few got to appreciate a pretty good show i don't think anyone but tim and i and maybe klaralyn got to appreciate the wonder at its fullest. we weren't sure if this was a regular occurrence or if they were especially plentiful this particular year, but neighboring farmers said that they hadn't seen this many before either. there are less of them now. i don't know if i will ever see as many at one time as i did this summer, but the memories will be with me for a very long time.