dragonlady7 | Aug. 22nd, 2016

Aug. 22nd, 2016

via http://ift.tt/2bapkAo:buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “oh! oh! oh! so! okay. Fridays are flower harvest days, hell all…”

this sounds wonderful, also, explosion grass?

sorry, Frosted Explosion Grass, my bad. I knew there was a word missing.

It looks like an explosion. It’s the best filler ever. I have to restrain myself from putting it into every bouquet.

via http://ift.tt/2bvAmlU:danceswchopstck replied to your post “danceswchopstck replied to your photo:Heirloom tomato tasting for a…”

The only tomato variety that I’ve found tastier than a Brandywine is completely un-irrigated (“dry-farmed”) Early Girls. I don’t know if you’d get the same effect in NY as we do in CA with the dry-farm technique. Our summers are damn dry, so that the tomatoes have to get their water by rooting way down into the water table. The tomatoes come out latish, smallish, tough-skinned, and with intense mineral-y flavor. I like that. :)

I have heard of dry farming! I don’t think anyone does it in the Northeast.

The peeps at the farm do want to try some different techniques. Currently, given the equipment they have, and the fifteen years or so wherein their predecessors did nothing innovative at all (though, they always used organic practices, so they do have some credit due to them for that) and sort of just tried not to think about long-term stuff, there are some issues– the fields all have some pretty brutal plow pan about eight inches down, because that’s as deep as their equipment can go. So… nothing can root through that.

But the veggie manager guy is really into the idea of no-till, and that would be more friendly to a low/no-irrigation setup. They might try it. It sounds pretty cool.

Some of the crops– winter squashes and potatoes– are in an area they can’t irrigate. The result is that the crops just fail; they lost most of the winter squash this year, and the potatoes are all marble-sized. I rather imagine that if you don’t set it up properly, that’s what you get with tomatoes too…

via http://ift.tt/2bJ5nQy:this-is-furious replied to your photo “Heirloom tomato tasting for a farm tour. (at Laughing Earth)”

Oooh what a delicious idea!

It was! Tomatoes, a little dish of salt with a tiny spoon, and a little dish of olive oil, and then there was some bread if people wanted substrate.

There was some kind of fundraising organization loosely affiliated with the agency in charge of raising funds to conserve farmland that had a kind of donor-courting Farm Tour thingy. It was… nice, but… we weren’t really sure what was going on? Still and all, we got to eat the fancy cheeses they brought, so we counted it as good.

The highlight of the event, in the retelling, is that FarmBaby had been playing in the sprinkler beforehand, and didn’t want to get dressed when people came over. The woman who had been babysitting her (a CSA member who is just her best friend in the world, and watches her for three hours every Thursday afternoon, which is the highlight of her week) managed to con her into a cute party dress, but she would not let us put her diaper back on, so, throughout the entire reception, she was underpantsless, and it would have been fine except she was tired and kept sitting in her mother’s lap and waving her feet around, which really put her y’know, intimate personal area on display pretty effectively. And like, I mean, she’s two, nobody cares, but it was a fundraising kind of thing and everyone was taking publicity photos, particularly of the Poster Child Family For Farm Conservation, so there’s my sister and her husband posing nicely, and then the entire center of the photo is FarmBaby’s naked crotch, so. My sister spent a lot of time trying to pull her party dress’s skirt down so it wasn’t quite so much of the photo. In the end I managed to get her into a diaper with a promise of playing in the hay wagon, but that was after the photography was mostly over with. So I hope they got some usable images and nobody has to sit there and Photoshop a diaper onto that kid. (I don’t think any of the staffers were really all that accomplished at Photoshop, and it felt weird to offer. Hey guys, if you want, I’ll erase my niece’s baby genitals from the photo, I do retouching, it’s cool. Hm.)

Anyway, that story’s gonna get told a lot in about fifteen years when Farmbaby starts dating, don’t worry. That’s how my family rolls. “Yeah there were all these rich donors in the backyard, and there you are putting your toes behind your ears because you could do that when you were two… Long story short, that’s why the current US Senator for this district has seen your private parts, honey.” (I have no real idea who the muckety-mucks were, but one lady with a polo shirt whose collar was standing straight up came over to talk to us very pleasantly and earnestly, and she had a diamond-crusted monogram of her own initials on a chain around her neck, and it was really something. Another lady was wearing actual honest-to-god jodhpurs.)

Everyone was very lovely, but I was really glad I’d taken a second to put on some linen crop pants instead of the torn cutoff sweatpants I’d been working in all day, because I felt really schlubby. As it is I’m hoping I get cropped out of the photos.

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spacelatinxs:

spacelatinxs + droids

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Back to my office job in my windowless isolation chamber. First thing that happened is that somebody brought their kid in with a device of some kind and sat them down watching a TV show while the parent shopped, and it was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else, and it overrode anything I was trying to read, for the entire half-hour duration of the episode. (Something called Paw Patrol, I guess. Paw Patrol is on a roll! Thanks.) (Remember, I’m in another room. That’s how loud it was.)
I’m really sort of disoriented and have forgotten how to sit down. I had not forgotten what a perfect hell of operational-memory resource draw this job is. I’m fucking terrible at this job. It doesn’t matter; nobody cares anyway, I get paid the same whether I’m competent or not, and extra work is never rewarded, so, lower your expectations, self, and try not to think about what that does to you.
I’m also trying to remember that I was working on a story or two and I don’t recall how that goes, so I probably need to reread the whole posted series, and I honestly don’t always enjoy rereading my own stuff lately, so bear with me: I may be sort of despairing at my own bullshit on here. Don’t feel insulted if I profess to hate a thing you like; I cannot be objective about my own shit. So, advance apologies.
But, hopefully I won’t hate it, and I’ll have an update to post in a timely-ish fashion! We’ll see.

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arachnescurse:

frogspawned:

i have an existential crisis every time i think about star wars droids. they have feelings, they experience fear, they are individuals. this is confirmed multiple times in canon. and people just. erase??? their memories and personalities??????? for convenience? they are treated them like objects, even by characters that we are meant to view as “good”. what!! the fuck! what the fuck!

Hello welcome to the constant hell of robot feels which I live in

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1540368.html

via http://ift.tt/2bd1hgE:
oh gosh it’s finally happened, my queue ran out! i only have it so it doesn’t look like i’m dead while i’m elsewise occupied. it posts twice a day, at 8 am and at 4pm, i don’t know how it decided that. i should put some things in it, maybe from my 1200 draft posts, but man. i just. man.

i have clearly Not Been Online lately.

I spent today rereading Home Out In The Wind and you know, I don’t hate it, so there’s that.

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1540781.html

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buttons-beads-lace replied to your post:Back to my office job in my windowless isolation…

I’d say something coherent and sympathetic re: noise overriding thought, but my girlfriend is watching tv right now so…

ughhhh there is no television set in my house so I am mostly spared this. at the farm, there *is* a TV, but it is rarely on, and if it is, I can just go sit in the office or the kitchen or you know, out to the ger, or up to the guest room which is also a sewing room sometimes, and so on. So.

but I really didn’t expect it to happen at work. Ugh ugh ugh. It just– you know, when I go out to restaurants, I sometimes have to hunt to try and find a seat from which I can’t see a TV– and sometimes that’s a vain quest. Those are the places I don’t go back to. Even on mute, a TV will destroy my ability to focus on conversation.

I used to think it was because I was brought up on strictly limited screen time, but you know, a book will do the same thing. It’s just ADHD and I’ve never gotten a diagnosis.

leftwinglibrarian replied to your post “Back to my office job in my windowless isolation chamber. First thing…”

Paw Patrol is the most annoying children’s show currently on the air! I’m so sorry you had to sit through that!

I have had to sit through a lot of children’s shows lately. I can usually sort of wander away. I actually got kind of absorbed in Octonauts recently. And my brother-in-law, all gangling six-feet-two of him, in an effort to make his daughter interact a little more instead of zoning out to the TV, dances along to Octonauts’ Creature Report whenever it comes on, and it’s so charming I can’t bring myself to hate the show, even if it is sort of stupid and weird. (WHY are the turnips also fish? I don’t understand! And their accents? Why? What is even going on? Most importantly where do they get the funding for so many gadgets?? I must know.)

Daniel Tiger is possibly the worst to sit through because of the near-constant repeats of catchy little ditties. I mean, they’ll literally sing a one-line ditty four hundred times in a twenty-minute episode, with key changes and all. BUT, i can’t bring myself to hate it because it is the only reason Farmbaby has reached several behavioral milestones, because she internalizes the ditties. “Grown-ups come back” got her to stop screaming whenever her mother left, and there’s a thing about taking a deep breath and counting to four that has actually defused a couple of tantrums, and they definitely teach a lot about Using Your Words that has come in really really handy. So I can’t resent it, but it’s also clearly for little-little-little kids.

The one I kind of hate is Nature Cat, because his weird Errol Flynn persona is so unexplained. Why the hell does he have “Tally-ho!” as a catchphrase? I just can’t even figure out what his schtick is supposed to be.

And bizarrely, I’m utterly charmed by Peg Plus Cat. I hate math but the weirdly polite pirates and the fact that she jams out on a ukelele so much and I’ve only seen like three episodes but there was one whole one that was just nonstop a musical pastiche of the Mozart opera The Magic Flute (it was called The Magic Uke) and it was so fucking great, for no reason, and the Queen of the Night’s aria was phenomenal and i don’t remember what they’d changed the lyrics to be about but the performance was great, the voice actress was genuinely a soprano who was genuinely just fucking going for it on that whole incredibly difficult part the aria’s famous for, and I thought, man, whoever this is– I wished there was another adult in the room, because farmbaby was just watching slack-jawed, and nobody could possibly understand what was so great about this. – whoever that voice actress is, I hope that’s the crowning central jewel of her portfolio, because it was fantastic.

Clearly I have spent a lot of time overhearing the PBS Kids’ app. And if I’m trying to, like, clean a toilet or fold laundry or cook supper, it’s one thing, especially because I can leave the room if it gets to be too much, but I was trying to sort through invoices and was trapped in my seat, and it was a goddamn nightmare.